by Brianna Crandall — January 6, 2016—The City of Portland, Oregon, has selected EnergyCAP, Inc., to provide a software solution for energy tracking for improved facilities management.
According to Jamie Waltz, the city’s strategic planning and development manager for the city’s facilities division, the new software will help the city track energy spending and implement programs to achieve goals in accordance with the 2030 Objective of the City / County Climate Action Plan. The objective includes a two percent annual reduction in energy use for city and county operations through capital projects and operational improvements.
The city’s procurement contract with EnergyCAP includes training, support services, customization, secure data storage and hosting, and historical data migration. It provides subscriptions and / or access to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) eGrid database of Greenhouse Gas Factors, weather data from AccuWeather, and automated submission of building energy data to the national ENERGY STAR energy benchmarking program.
EnergyCAP will also provide the capability to track other measureable sustainability data in the future, such as employee use of alternative transportation, volunteerism, office paper and toner usage, fleet inventory, and fuel consumption.
EnergyCAP Senior Implementation Manager David Ulmer said the software acquisition was a win-win for city government and the people of Portland. “Tracking energy usage and costs can be difficult and time-consuming,” he said. “EnergyCAP provides a standardized method for the City of Portland to both record utility billing data and easily report on it.
“EnergyCAP will empower Facilities Services by dramatically expanding the division’s capacity to track and reduce energy use and also calculate the cost savings of the city’s energy efficiency and sustainability projects. This will save the city and taxpayers energy and money.”
EnergyCAP implementation will be handled through Facilities Services, a division within the Portland Office of Management and Finance (OMF) responsible for the operation and maintenance of many of the city’s buildings. The division is responsible for 46 buildings totaling about 4 million square feet.
EnergyCAP software will enable OMF to track energy consumption and generation, water use, landfill, compost and recycling rates in order to help identify where energy reduction and cost-saving measures can be taken.
The initial EnergyCAP implementation will include a minimum of 20 buildings. Once the software is up and running, the city has planned to make incremental additions of buildings and points of measureable data, with the end goal of bringing all desired historical utility and sustainability data for all city-owned properties into a single database for on-demand reporting and benchmarking.
For more than 30 years, the award-winning EnergyCAP software has helped 10,000 energy managers track more than $25 billion in energy spending, according to the company.
