The UMA Town Hall is an enthusiastic and collaborative discussion of best practices, experiences (good and bad), and pro-tips from some of the industry’s most seasoned utility management and sustainability professionals. A fantastic event that is both equal parts networking and learning, the UMA Townhall “Lessons Learned from Benchmarking Reporting” did not disappoint; the conversation exceeded the hour for which it was originally scheduled. Here are some of the main highlights of this brewed-down discussion.
Utility Management is not a seasonal activity:
Discussion leaders Madeline Roberts, from Greystar, and Peter Chan from Fairfield Residential, agreed that the benefits from evaluating performance do not end with reporting, and in some instances, the reporting function occurs in concert with vigilant monitoring.
Madeline: We are pulling data into our system to develop an internal score for our properties, so the community teams understand their performance. We often use EnergyStar Portfolio Manager data to do this, because the whole building data is so helpful when evaluating performance.
Peter: We do not really wait for Annual Reporting Schedules. We’re capturing data throughout the year, and not just once per year to satisfy the Benchmarking Requirements. We might be reporting once a year, but we capture and use this Utility Data year-round for various purposes: to evaluate the need for efficiency projects, to identify performance anomalies, pushing data to our vendor partners for various analyses, and increasingly for Capital Markets activities or Transactional Due Diligence.
EnergyStar Portfolio Manager (ESPM) KPI’s are helpful:
The KPI’s available vary from the well-known EnergyStar score, to Energy Use Intensity (EUI) to Green House Gas (GHG) emissions. Depending on the goal of the operator, different KPI’s achieve different results.
Madeline: We use the EnergyStar Score to apply for funding for properties.
Andrew Bilodeau from Stoneweg indicated that they use EUI in jurisdictions that have Building Performance Standards (BPS) requirements to focus their Capex budgets.
A tangent discussion on Building Performance Standards then ensued:
Madeline: The Challenge we see from BPS is that depending on how we have to set up a property in EPSM to comply, we may not have a full picture of the property’s performance; in some ways, BPS makes it harder to get a clear picture of performance for a community.
Chris Laughman, also from Greystar, indicated that in some jurisdictions, there can be challenges when you are looking at the data coming directly from a utility provider and the data is incorrect. The regulators concurrently require you to submit that data. You cannot truly evaluate the performance of the property when you are required to use data that you cannot assure.
Final Pro Tips shared by the discussion leaders:
Madeline: Sometimes letters of noncompliance go to the ownership and not to our team. It can cause difficult conversations with the ownership when that happens.
Peter: What makes this even more difficult is that some vendors out there, send out fake notices of noncompliance to scare you into contracting with them. It is a scary sales tactic and causes a lot of distress in an organization while introducing a lot of noise to the decision-making process.
UMA Town Halls occur every few months, with varying discussion topics selected to be timely for our Townhall participants. Be sure to keep your eyes peeled for the meeting invitations to these free events to ask questions of your peers, learn and meet new and experienced practitioners in sustainability and utility management.