Measurement
Performance contracting was built on the concept that an outside company pays for facility upgrades and is then repaid by the facility owner out of their utility savings. The idea is simple, but the documentation is not. Each month the performance contracting company reports to the facility owner how much money they are owed based on the calculated amount of money they would have spent without the upgrades. The complexity of producing this detailed report is included in the contract and the cost is ultimately paid for by the owner out of their utility savings. Additionally, these reports can be dozens or hundreds of pages long depending on the scope, and must be reviewed and approved monthly.
Verification
We understand that you need a low-cost way to track your past improvements that is concise, understandable, and can be used to justify your future energy improvement projects. You want to verify that the project you approved is working as intended and you want to keep track of those dollars for use in future efficiency or other capital improvement projects.
Through customer feedback, we have found that our 6-page Savings Tracker report is popular and beneficial. This quarterly document is primarily graphical, which allows you to quickly review your building’s actual performance and compare it to predictions, yearly trends, and how these changes are affecting your Department of Energy or Energy Star Score. The data is automatically normalized for weather but can also be normalized for other report metrics (student attendance, widgets produced, etc.).
Sustainability
The longer the Savings Tracker is active, the more useful the data will be. Typically, after a new project is installed, we see a noticeable drop in energy usage and everyone on the team is excited. Then, after a year or so, the savings is flat and the report starts to feel stale. Despite its low cost, you may be tempted to not renew the tracker. That would be a mistake because unless you are aggressively using a BAS data harvesting analytics program to provide ongoing commissioning, this report may be the only way to identify that your system is drifting and that a re/retro-commissioning project may be recommended.