Collaborate on Utility Bill Maker for Organizations with Ease Using airSlate SignNow

Utility bill maker for organizations

all right well i want to welcome everybody to utility bill optimization and lead advanced tracking this course is approved for gbci uh aibd bpi non-whole house as well as health welfare and safety which may make it applicable to your state-based design or contractor license my name is brett little and i am the program manager here at the non-profit the green home institute our mission is to empower people to make healthier and more sustainable choices in the renovation and construction of the places we live um we're going to be talking um a lot about you know how do we utilize our utility bills especially in the multi-family and commercial sector and how that will tie into many of the green building programs and can be used to help reduce cost is the ultimate goal and i'm super thankful for this session sponsor build equinox with the serve 2 smart ventilation system unlike traditional ervs or hrvs these have many qualities of a smarter balanced ventilation feedback monitoring with a standard erv or hrv you get a constant low air flow rate with no relation to the actual indoor air quality or occupancy for the first three days when the home is occupied in this description the air quality is poor the erv just can't keep up when the occupants leave on vacation the erv keeps ventilating and wasting energy since the serve actually monitors the air quality it ventilates only when it's needed compared to an erv this serve can ventilate up to 300 cfm quickly purging pollutants from the home when no ventilation is needed the serve can recirculate and unify the home providing some additional heating cooling or dehumidification in an energy efficient manner the serve does this by monitoring co2 and volatile organic compound levels um and so when these are detected they're preset by your clients to whatever level they want to be or the levels recommended by some of the air quality agencies and then ventilates to reduce the co2s and bocs as needed instead of an erv exchange core the serve has a high efficiency heat pump to exchange energy between incoming supply and outgoing air and it has advanced easy filter access which can get all the way up to merv 13 or merv 16 which of course can help stop a viral transmission one cool thing about these folks is that they manufacture right in urbana illinois in a facility that's a hundred percent powered by solar and they team up with many of our other friends they work great with a heat pump water heater such as the proterra to boost capacity or work with radiant they can work to help distribute mitsubishi's mini split system air around homes which we've seen in some of our projects they can also work with our friends over at geocomfort geothermal or water furnace to boost a geo check them out at build equinox dot com today and then i also want to thank our second sponsor niagara conservation they've got some of the lowest flowing toilets on the planet um all the way down to 0.5 gallons per flush i've got one it works just great and we see many of our multi-family affordable housing renovators swapping this out to help reduce water bills and they're just as durable as traditional toilets and they've got 1.5 gallon per minute aerators 1.25 shower heads super low flow to help save water all right so again utility bill optimization and lead advanced tracking um when it comes to lead certification there are some additional bonus points if you follow some of the recommendations um that we're going to be talking about throughout this throughout this session there are a couple different strategies here so if you go into the advanced utility traction uh tracking credit uh it's not a requirement but credit on their website um at least for lead for homes and i believe commercial you can do whole building master metering which is pathway one and so step one is share data through utility reporting so you confirm the building has a single master electrical meter for all units select a utility tracking provider such as the one we're going to be talking about and that can share data with usgbc very very simple and then document that or pathway 2 if there's individual unit meters share data through utility reporting common space of the energy use and then i believe they're going to be looking for at least 50 percent um of the occupants to get access to their data through some sort of disclosure and be able to to to share that and then the other important thing is that you're educating the occupants on you know what their uh utility usage is maybe you're doing some sort of incentive if they enroll into the program and review their utility usage and reduce it or maybe you're doing something like a battle the buildings like we do here in michigan every year where there's a big competition and people can win money or pizza or whatever to reduce their energy so there's all sorts of fun ideas you can use for that but as long as you're finding a way to track it through a third party application and usgbc can access it that's a great way to get those points and so we're going to talk about a strategy to do that here today for those of you who are using the enterprise green communities program this is not extra points anymore this is mandatory so you do have to track this you have to track utility usage gas electric and water both for a significant amount of the tenants as well as the common spaces in your green communities certification projects so we help with that with our teams that are doing that but that is something that is required and again we're going to talk about um throughout the strategies today that we're going to hear about uh this is going to be available to you to easily document and meet the uh requirement for enterprise uh green communities and sharing it and sharing it with them so with that i will uh hand it off to um brian haverding brian is the managing director at foresight management he has four plus years of experience leading commercial and industrial facility operators to greater understanding of their energy usage and costs and developing strategies for management and improvement so with that brian i'm going to hand it to you and please do take it away sounds good hey thanks a lot brett i appreciate it um give me just a second here to make sure i figure out the shared screen properly monitor two that looking good brett it is yep all right wonderful cool well uh good afternoon everybody and thanks for thanks for joining us today and and special thanks to brett for inviting uh myself to uh to present on utility bill optimization and uh some of the work that uh myself and my team have been up to over the last handful of years in the energy management space um we have uh been living and breathing energy management in commercial and industrial and and many times residential buildings uh over the last several years um and so it's exciting to get to know other folks in the in this space and uh understand what you guys are uh are attempting to do as it relates to tracking and optimization and ultimately lowering um both the usage and cost uh of your energy bills um it's something that we nerd out on quite a bit and uh we're looking forward to nerding out with you guys a little bit more so uh thanks for being here and and once again yeah thanks thanks to brett i'm going to go through a brief presentation here uh in addition to the presentation there's going to be a little bit of a technology demonstration that we'll do about midway through but just as a little bit of a pathway to where we're going i will start with a brief introduction uh we'll talk at a high level about utility bill collection and some best practices uh as it relates to to collecting utility bills on a regular basis um i mentioned we'll go through a little demonstration of a technology platform that can assist in doing that collection um and then we'll get into some items around utility optimization so how can we leverage this data collection and these best practices around uh around seeing this data on a regular basis leverage that information into cost savings um and and better transparency uh across the board and then we'll have some time for open discussion uh and questions um along the way though i'm you know happy to to answer questions along the way brett and i talked about 45 minutes ago that uh we'd love for this to be a conversation as much as possible so if there are questions that you want to submit um brett will will uh has been given permission by me to interrupt me uh along the way so uh so he'll definitely do that and we can have this be a dynamic discussion along the way with that though just a quick introduction so brett alluded to it a second ago my name is brian hobart inc i'm from foresight management foresight is a energy and sustainability consulting firm and engineering firm based here in grand rapids michigan we were founded in 2007 our focuses are on energy and sustainability management partnering as an as an outsourced sort of energy or sustainability manager for our clients and we do that by leveraging software consulting expertise as well as a robust engineering team here as well before we get too far into utility bill collection and some of the nitty-gritty details that go along with that i i want to kind of zoom out and uh start with why if you were in the conference room um that i'm sitting in right now you would see behind me a nice color coordinated bookshelf it's our new dewey decimal system i joke but on that bookshelf you would see about six copies of a book by a guy named simon sinek called start with why and simon in the book describes this golden circle of leadership and organizational motivation that at the most outer ring is answering the question what do we do and then as you move forward how do we do it and then at the center of the golden circle why are we doing it what is the uh uh what is kind of the the bigger picture reason behind uh this project or this initiative and we we start every conversation as it relates to uh new initiatives here at foresight with this question of why um and it's really instrumental in how we developed our own systems around energy management um the the why at the core of it was we we needed to have greater understanding and uh have the ability to make database decisions uh for everything that we do um and so when we talk to to clients and when we talk to potential partners we always uh try to circle back and start with why as much as possible as we kind of drill down into that question a little bit deeper though around utility bill collection at the foundation of energy management we believe is a process and system uh that starts with supply side management um so supply side management is uh is collecting data uh from our electricity gas water all the vendors that are producing and serving a building with with energy assets i we want to create good robust systems around supply side management because as the famed austrian consultant peter drucker said you cannot manage what you don't measure so we need to start with a really robust system around how we're managing how we're measuring uh the supply side of the energy that's flowing into our building uh some of the reasons why this is uh of of high importance for an organization is it establishes a common language so as you go from coast to coast and really around the globe the language of energy changes just like the language that we speak changes there's uh as many of you know there's you know different units of measure there's different types of uh charges that exist on a utility bill there's different ways to measure uh the consumption uh for a particular building and so uh developing a supply-side strategy that has a common language is is first and foremost very important and helps us make good decisions uh the second piece is a singular location so this gets at the technology demo that we'll go through in a little bit but being able to house all of our utility data for the number of different facilities or different types of units within a campus that we're tracking uh having that all live and breathe in one location that we can then share to our constituents or stakeholders is very important and helps us make uh quick and efficient decisions uh the third piece is the cultural impact transparency and savings so these are all kind of three different things but the cultural impact and transparency piece is really lifting up the fact that hey if we're going to commit ourselves to measuring our energy data this is this is more than just one person their role at the organization this is something that we want to sort of permeate the entire team permeate the entire company um so that everybody has some buy-in and sees a direct tie between their their activities and how it's impacting the overall goals uh and measurement strategies of the organization and by way of doing that by way of measuring uh we often times find savings uh the association of energy engineers released a study not long ago that said simply by putting building management systems and utility management systems in place simply by just doing that not necessarily embarking on any other strategy uh facilities see a three to ten percent reduction in overall energy usage and cost it's that that old adage of just paying attention makes uh uh makes uh more successful results and then the final thing is data grounded decision making so as facility operators are considering things like led upgrades or toilet upgrades or hvac upgrades or roof replacements um it's good to have data based decision making at our fingertips and what better way to make those decisions than grabbing the actual utility data from the actual facility to make those best decisions so those are kind of the why reasons why we're doing this why it matters right database decision making and uh and best practices that that all stakeholders can kind of jump on board with um the how we do it though kind of moving back on that golden circle the how we do that um can be done in a lot of different ways right microsoft excel is a great tool that we can utilize to track data and share files um but another way that we can track a lot of this data is by leveraging technology i mean i'm going to go through a demonstration of of a software platform that our team has built um at foresight um that does exactly this it's an energy management dashboard that collects uh utility data on a regular basis and then pushes it out to our clients there's a number of these kinds of software's in the marketplace today but i'm going to take you through a demonstration of ours so you guys can see some of the um sort of some of the features that exist in these types of platforms so bear with me here a second i'm gonna pause and jump into here and then we will start again okay brad are we still good on the share screen are you guys seeing the dashboard sorry i've got commute on here yeah you're good to go okay good i was for a second there i thought i was lost in in the sea of technology okay cool um all right great so now we're into uh uh the energy management dashboard and what we have in front of us here is uh just a sample client of ours um but i want to show you guys sort of the the way that this works and uh some of the features that it has and um and then how it could potentially apply to uh some of the projects you guys are working on so we're on the home page here um of the dashboard which has a number of different sort of modules within it i'm going to start here by just focusing on what's on the top left hand side of the screen so what we have here is the ability to uh to filter out our data so maybe zooming back just a little bit when we onboard a new facility or a new organization we map out that uh that facility in a hierarchy of sites buildings and then meters brett mentioned earlier that um for a lot of these projects and for the requirements uh for for credits uh there needs to be you know certain percentage thresholds met of how much utility data is collected and for what types of properties uh that's where this sort of hierarchy and framework comes in we can organize by an overall site which we sort of describe as a campus and on that campus can be multiple buildings there could be an office building a you know a maintenance building in a lot of the cases of our clients a manufacturing building um but names of different buildings on that campus and then each of those buildings is fed by individual utility meters water electricity gas etc and so we start by building out that framework so that we can filter our data down or we can zoom all the way back up and see the organization as a whole so what we're looking at here is the last 12 months of data february 2020 to february of 2021 and we're filtering right now to just the meter of electricity uh beneath here you can see the different tables that i described as sites buildings and meters and as we filter these out what gets produced at the bottom here are dynamic graphs of consumption and cost simple bar graphs that when hovering over them we can see the actual consumption of electricity as well as the actual cost on a month to month basis over the last 12 months the other thing that we can do well let me back up a second so if we click on just an individual site we'll see in birmingham alabama on that site there are four different buildings building one building 1a the office the warehouse clicking through and selecting these automatically updates our graphs uh down here below so that we can see trends from month to month um and from year to year as we as we filter out so somewhat predictably we have uh in birmingham alabama an office building that we would anticipate to have higher electricity bills in the summer time rather than the winter because of the increased load of electricity and we can clearly see that here in our trends for both consumption and cost if we want to get more granular though if we wanted to go beyond just the bar graph and see hey what are the actual utility bills saying for uh this particular building we can toggle from graph to to the table view and what the table view shows us is all of the information from a utility bill that our team is grabbing uh or that the software is grabbing on the back end so as you guys can uh relate perhaps there's a lot of complexity and then electricity or water or gas spill there's a lot of different uh things being measured and numbers and words flying around uh what we're doing and what software can do on the back end is grab the most pertinent data the consumption the cost the start date and end date the name of the account and meter so that it maps in properly to the right building and an individual location and then push that into the software and so that's what we're doing here we see we've got a utility provider of alabama power account and meter number clearly listed uh what the metric is start date and end date of that particular utility bill service period uh and then the consumption and overall cost in addition to grabbing all that information uh software can also be a housing place for the actual utility bill which in many cases is very important because this is the source data this is how we're getting the information and in you know the world of auditing and greenhouse gas emission reporting and making sure that our data is as accurate as possible we want to make sure that we have the correct uh source data housed directly here so clicking on this attachment uh pulls up the actual copy of of the invoice that we can see all the other other information on filter back out the other way that we can organize data in software is by tagging individual buildings so if there's multiple facilities across the the country that an operator is responsible for um and he or she wants to look at them by a different type of category than just geographic they can tag the buildings with certain names so just listing a few tags here for example with manufacturing buildings quality control office buildings regional branches warehouses all of these things are at the discretion of the facility operator to name and to to to map in and and can work within the software to sort of reorganize it uh to best meet um their organization's sort of structure a couple other pages that i just want to show real quick um there's a trends page here so this very similar um similar page to that home page but just gets a little bit more i guess right up in front of us we can see uh consumption and cost trends uh by sweat and then we can select you know different data sets going back to however far we want um back to march of 2019 for example we can see the trends of the entire organization and then we can also drill down here into individual sites buildings accounts and meters as well and graphs automatically update the raw data page is another page that we can uh that we can view all that information that we're grabbing from from an individual bill again we can continue to filter down and then the last piece that i wanted to show is um the idea of data completeness is a big deal in the world of utility tracking hey am i grabbing all of the information or just a percentage of it um and so there's a uh in many of these softwares including ours there's a gap analysis feature which shows for each of the sites and buildings and meters how well the software is doing and the provider in our case how well we're doing on collecting utility data from each individual facility on each given month and what our sort of percent completion is here across the top i'm going to stop sharing there's a couple other things i just want to go through but it's they're not necessarily related to the dashboard so i'm going to pause here a second um would this be a good time for any questions or are you going to still stick to some more dash i don't want to ask something you're going to get to so no go go ahead brett i have that i'm i'm done with the demo of the dashboard but i can easily bring it back up if there's a question pertaining to it well yeah there's a great question here um you know more and more utilities are moving towards um time of use or i guess even away from that now into smart energy management i guess i want to call it and based on hourly ratings and you know trying to shift usage to certain times of the day and reward you financially for that um so i mean is is this something you all are able to address or you're planning to address and help provide people information on not just the month um but or the day but you know the actual hour of usage yeah yeah so that's a great question and something that we've been uh we've been working on over the last few years um because more and more utilities to your point are at are are implementing these types of rates and then making this data available to their customers um how our platform the foresight platform how it currently is structured is um not to show interval data necessarily but just to show the monthly um the monthly data the monthly overall consumption and cost um however what we'll get into this in a little bit around the optimization piece um what our our team does and not to make this too much of a foresight thing but what can be done is we can grab that data from the utility provider that interval data with every 15 minutes laid out of exactly how much is being consumed and then we can lay that against calculators that that we've built on the back end that show exactly what the charges are at the different times of day typically in a time of use rate you're going to have on peak and off peak hours on peak hours being typically between 10 a.m and 6 p.m and off-peak hours being in on the nights and in the weekends or in the nights into the weekends um consumers energy here in the great state of michigan has gotten more granular than that as has so cal edison and several other utilities across the country where they have different rates in uh like two or three hour chunks at different times of the year different seasons of the year and so when we talk about utility optimization in a minute what our team uh what our team really emphasizes is let's grab that interval data whenever we can if consumers or southern california edison or comed is going to make that available let's get that information and let's run through uh some calculators to make sure that it's that the the facility is on the best rate that is something from a software perspective that's on the the long-term roadmap for us uh but we're currently uh just providing the monthly the monthly data and the monthly collection of that data yeah and you kind of started answering my next question and just to confirm you i mean you're not expecting folks to be uh you know sending in all this data all the time you can work out agreements with the utility companies to collect it all correct that's yeah that's a great question brett and and spot and dancers yes um there's not a great way of showing that but um the way that we onboard a facility or a group of of facilities is first by obtaining all of the facility data addresses uh number of electricity and gas accounts account numbers account meters we grab a utility copy a bill copy from the from the client uh and then we go to work on getting that the rest of that data the historical data and the data moving forward from the utility provider themselves um so the way that the software works in the background is by way of a utility login so a username and a password we can we can go out and grab data on a daily basis so as soon as a new bill is made available by the utility our software is grabbing that data and pulling it into our software so there's no manual process of somebody needing to submit a bill and then fat fingering that bill into into some dashboard or into some excel file the software is continually going out and looking for new data from that account for that building and pulling it into the dashboard on a regular basis great and then um you know lastly you know like when it comes to the the lead certification program or enterprise you know there is a a requirement that um you know that you know one of the folks at this entity could be able to access your data just to make sure that you're performing well um so are there opportunities you know within these tools to give other entities you know a way to review or review a limited amount of information i'm sure there's privacy issues in place but is that something you can do yeah yes absolutely um and in fact i'm gonna share my screen again there's uh within the software there's a few different um functions that exist for sharing data um when uh when a building or a facility or a group of facilities or organization is set up like one two three corp is here we can set up parameters that say share only consumption data with this particular person or this group of people at this outside organization we'll you know give them their email address and patent and they'll receive an invitation to our dashboard to view whatever the the entity is um that wants to share the data with them uh they can log in and view all that information and we and we do that just by you know going up here to settings and we do this through this members and invitations um page and we can set up some uh some criteria on what they're able to see and what they're not able to see great thanks yeah great questions yep are there any other questions as it relates to the software well you know i was looking at the kilowatt hour report and um i'm wondering obviously you know you need to get granular on your consumption on gas and electric you know if you're trying to make informed decisions and you're going to talk a little bit about this now so i'm not going to get too far ahead but but if you're trying to um from a sustainability standpoint get a sort of high level like you know whatever it might be and then like my facility uses this much energy per year however you want to make the conversion mmbtu or therms or kilowatts you know do you have the ability to merge gas and electric together do you provide you know carbon use data so people might be able to say oh you know i could buy this many carbon offsets or do you have anything in place where people can get carbon offsets working with you through your program or if you're looking into that just just some thoughts if people are trying to tell this narrative of like yeah we're off setting here's our total usage and here's how we're trying to offset it yeah yeah great yeah brett great questions and all things that are on our roadmap um from a development perspective we sort of our our position in this world is um we want to be the go-to for data completeness and data integrity we want our clients and users to know that we've created processes and systems that lift up data completeness and data integrity above all else and then all the fun things that people do with energy data we we want to hear about them and we want to build them into the dashboard when appropriate um but we but there's a ton of different use cases the ones that you mentioned though those are definitely things that are on our roadmap for automatically converting into uh into carbon or into greenhouse gas emissions um for particular for a particular set of data that's on the roadmap for something we're working on developing right now um the other thing that you mentioned is uh collecting data and converting it into mmbtus uh that's another functionality that that exists uh as well um but the the thing that i think most of our users are are leveraging ours uh this system for is the data completion and so they come down here to to this raw data page they see all the individual um items that are that exist from the utility bills and then they just download it into excel and they they do the fun things that they that they need to do for their stakeholders and on their own business uh uh needs by just working it out in excel that being said the greenhouse gas emissions and carbon management stuff those are both on our development roadmaps great thanks brian yeah you bet all right i'm going to pause again and get back to the presentation and there we go okay okay so we've actually been hinting at this a little bit but just wanted to go through briefly some trends uh in the uh overall electricity and natural gas uh industry that are impacting the way that uh facility operators and building owners are being charged for energy many of these things will probably be obvious but there's you know they have implications on literally the the rates that we kind of talked about a second ago and some of the procurement opportunities that exist within utilities so the first thing is the evolution of the electricity grid here in the united states so what you can see from this graph which i pulled this morning from from the eia is the generation assets that exist here in the u.s are consistently moving away from solar toward natural gas and the share of renewables like wind and solar here on the bottom are continuing to grow because of this uh utilities are changing out their generation assets all the time and are are faced with assets that they need to maintain on their balance sheet like big coal power plants that are consistently being disrupted by things like distributed generation people putting solar panels on their own house uh organizations developing other generation assets within their own building so there's a lot of disruption in the whole generation mix that is uh that's impacting how uh utilities are then passing on charges to their to their customers um that evolution can be seen here in this bar graph as well over the last uh couple of years this is year-to-year data from 2019 we've seen a 24 percent uh increase in solar and a 12 increase in wind assets on uh the energy consumption or energy generation grid um and and coal is continually kind of falling uh kind of falling behind um in addition to that evolution there's just this overall increased demand for electricity globally uh there's the electrification of more and more uh developing societies in in as well as societies like the us with evs uh with building building automation continuing to uh to to improve as well as growing populations uh and and higher standards of living um so there's just a there's been a strain and a higher degree of of demand for electricity in in our residential and commercial um spaces primarily with all these sort of shifts in the uh in the grid and in the demand in the supply and demand for electricity utilities have been responding and and the question earlier is one that resonates um with one way they're responding and that's through time of use rates uh so in response to this evolving electricity grid and the smarter grid utilities are uh are basically partnering with their uh with their clients saying hey here's here's how we're getting charged for electricity here's our business model help us improve help us avoid demand charges avoid these uh rolling brownouts by understanding better how you're being charged for electricity and when the when the grid is most strained so time of use rates are becoming a norm uh in utility for utilities across the country uh demand response programs are also becoming much more normal so this is the idea of shifting uh load to off-peak hours as much as possible and is really being seen in the manufacturing and industrial space but more and more in commercial spaces as well so i want to get into rates and tariffs a little bit so talking about the utility industry talking about how electric utilities specifically are charging their customers um for uh for their month on their monthly bills um the idea of rates and tariffs is something that kind of goes back though to this whole idea of supply side management and consistently uh monitoring our facilities energy usage as well as monitoring the um the utility landscape of how they're how they're charging customers for uh for for these fuels uh comes into this idea of consistently looking at rates and tariffs so just go through a few bullet points here as an overview new construction projects green builds are oftentimes placed on electricity and gas rates at the time of construction and then are shifted into the appropriate rate that they should be on uh at the time uh that the the building is completed and it's turn keyed um market shifts and grid evolution as we discussed a little bit earlier are inspiring these utilities to come out with new rates on a very consistent basis as often as once per year these utility providers however even though they come out with new rates they're rarely proactive about setting their customers up on the best rate possible so they don't they don't look at how each of the buildings and each of the facilities within their territory are using energy on a year-to-year basis and then putting them in the best rate oftentimes uh they most often times they leave that to the customer to understand uh and make those changes on their own and in addition to the utilities changing facilities are ever changing right we're implementing energy efficiency projects we're upgrading to leds we're uh changing out uh changing out air conditioning units we're doing complete building remodels and because of all those things that happen in our facilities where the facilities profile of how it's using energy is also evolving so you have these kind of two dynamic things at play the utilities are changing and then the very specific facility that that we're operating is also changing and the rates need to sort of line up and we need to be continually reviewed in order to make sure that we're doing the best we can so some recommendations as it relates to rates and tariffs um first if if you have a utility representative um that that you you know have the contact information for reach out to them and say hey i'm working on this facility i'm working with this building i'm working on uh this project i want to make sure that we're actually on the best rate can you do a review of this account and this meter ensure that our electricity and gas rates are are where they should be based on the historical usage that we've had the other thing is to well just a quick example on this so asking the utility representative um we last year we were working with one of our one of our clients who was building a large retail store down in indiana um and that store was built actually uh in 2017 um and at the time it was placed on just a very small general service rate uh with the the local utility i was placed on that rate when the building was being constructed so during construction it wasn't drawing a ton of electricity and then at the time that the store opened it stayed on that general service rate it didn't get moved to the appropriate large primary rate that it should be on and so for about a year and a half prior to our engagement with the client about a year and a half went by and they were on this general small rate um and when we came in and started doing utility bill collection for them and reviewing rates and understanding their usage profile it was a it stood stood out like a sore thumb because uh it was such a small rate relative to the type of building uh with refrigeration and heating and cooling and lighting um and it resulted in uh a rate change that is gonna save or help them avoid about two hundred thousand dollars per year in electricity costs and this isn't to say that that happens all the time uh but it is to sort of lift up this idea of continuous uh continuous monitoring of both utility bills and of the utility industry to make sure that the rates are are the most appropriate ones i mentioned this before so demand response look out for increasing demand charges over the next several months and years within the utility space there's uh more and more with smart meters and uh the grid being stressed at individual times those charges are being passed on to the customers um uh more and more consider items on utility bills that that could be avoided is another thing to to look out for so you're reviewing utility bills for your buildings look at items like sales tax look at items like energy optimization programs and ask your utility reps hey are these things that that i need to be paying sales tax do i need to be paying that our bill or we're a non-profit or we're doing some manufacturing at this building what's the what are the rules around sales tax that um that we can maybe take some exemptions on um and then you know just a plug here to to run uh calculations at least on an annual basis to make sure that those rates are are in the best place possible um and then you know partner with a trusted advisor to do that if need be any questions on i'm going to pause there on rates and tariffs um we talked about it a little bit with the time you used stuff on the demonstration but i'll pause there if there's any questions um not specific to that um but if someone if something does come up i'll let you know okay no problem all right we'll keep going here so so that's rates and tariffs that's that's your uh your plan with your local utility provider your consumers or dte or semco or uh the local provider that owns and operates the the transmission lines that sends the electricity and gas to your building those are the rates and tariffs that uh some best practices around that that you can you can take away the other piece of the pie is energy procurement and we differentiate these two things so i as you can see from this this uh map the markets for electricity and natural gas and the regulation around them differs from state to state so as you can see from the the key here uh the states and whites are completely regulated for electricity and natural gas uh light blue are deregulated for gas dark blue electricity and then the stripes are deregulated gas and electricity markets and what this means is uh that particular that particular state has adopted uh deregulation um so they've opened up their market for alternative energy suppliers and energy marketers to uh introduce increased competition within those states so they're not just handing a monopoly to uh to the incumbent utility provider uh they're they're offering um or they're opening that up to greater competition this has been something that's really been evolving over the last several decades um the passages of things like the energy policy act in 1992 um in 2001 michigan uh decided to deregulated deregulate their entire natural gas market uh as well as ten percent of their electricity market um and these things are continuing on you know on the floor of of state legislatures offices and and uh and talked about and uh uh and are evolving and what this what this really means though from a customer's perspective is you have choice you don't have to buy the commodity of electricity or gas from the utility you can contract for that commodity with an alternative supplier on a from a basic level the market structure looks like this right we've got generation we've got resellers which include the utility companies but also in deregulated spaces include uh electricity marketers and natural gas marketers and then we have end users alternative suppliers in deregulated markets um the advantage there that they can offer is oftentimes more uh kind of a broader base of of product offerings they they have more renewable assets and can offer uh unique products as it relates to um to wind energy or solar more so than than the local utility can they also can offer long-term contracts for the commodity of gas or electricity so if you want to lock in for 12 or 24 months to a certain price and a certain volume you can do that you can hedge against some market risk all of this is helping create more competitive uh markets for for these utilities um and is challenging honestly the incumbent utilities that have been given monopolies in the space uh to to bring on new products to add more green generation into their uh into their mix um and offer it to their customers i've just listed a few examples of of alternative suppliers that uh have a prominent kind of position here in in michigan and in the midwest but there are certainly others as well um brian is that is that uh is that kind of like when the um you know the guy comes knocking on your door and they're wearing the safety vest they're like hey you know uh i can get you a better deal on your gas usage i mean is that is that kind of what you're talking about but at a grander level spot on brett yes and that was i was going to give that story in the recommendations section next there's um so yes this goes this is as grand as hedging strategies and buying into the future and having you know a real like commodity uh sort of trading strategy and risk management strategy all the way down to yeah the guy in the safety vest that walks up to your door knocks and says hey i can like can i see your natural gas bill i think i can get you a better deal um for the the story i'll give is two two and a half years ago now i i was sitting in my living room um we got a knock on the door my wife went to the door to answer it uh and she said hey uh she turned to me and said hey there's a guy here that wants to see our natural gas bill so i i walked outside with him and he uh he was running me through his spiel on hey like let me see one of your dte bills i think i can get you a better rate i asked him politely to see the clipboard that he was uh that he had in his hand and and the contract that he was going to sign me up for and i saw it you know yep in fact it was true the first month or first two months the rate uh the per unit rate of natural gas would have been lower than what i was paying uh with dte but the fine print of the contract and pages two and three explained that uh as soon as uh the first three months are up then i'm gonna be transitioned into this variable market rate uh that's gonna have these different adders associated with it that's going to be uh you know basically an unknown price and i'm locking into that strategy for 36 months if i signed on the on the dotted line and so needless to say i i sent i sent the man and the vest on his way um but it's not something that's uh atypical especially with organizations that we work with right there's a lot of facilities uh out there in the world who um have people you know uh focused on other things not just you know uh not just their gas or electricity bills so when they hear that they can get a better deal from from a marketer or from somebody that comes up and shows them a contract um oftentimes they sign up and and oftentimes those are those are very bad deals um and because of that there's sort of a sort of a black eye on the on the energy marketing industry because there's been a lot of uh poor performers and uh not so above the table activities going on in the space um and so that's where you know we recommend taking a a close look at what you're buying taking a close look at any contracts that you might be in or unknowingly might be in on your utility bills oftentimes right on the bill it will say who the marketer is if you're buying it from an alternative supplier so you can you can take some uh some time to do some of that homework um because at the end of the day there's there's good strategies that exist with alternative energy suppliers but they need to be managed well they need to be consistently reviewed we need to know when the expiration dates are on those contracts so that we can re-engage re-engage suppliers for new for new pricing and not get burned so as it relates to just some of those recommendations in michigan for example natural gas is fully deregulated we've seen natural gas prices since 2014 remained pretty steady and pretty low with a couple exceptions of january 2019 a polar vortex kind of spiking it um but the recommendation that we would have in this space is um if you're looking at an alternative supplier or sending out an rfp to different suppliers for the gas or electricity load of your building don't just look at the suppliers bids against each other always review them against the utility itself because you don't need to buy something from the utility but you also don't need to contract with an alternative supplier you can you can shift and you can move uh back and forth um once once per year um to to take advantage of the best rates and and what we're seeing in the market today is that smaller users places like office buildings like ours and probably residential buildings as well um are doing well by staying with their utility company to be honest the utilities especially here in the midwest have been pretty competitive um relative to alternative suppliers but just as a way just as another kind of note around best practices it's always good to uh to review that and to send to send out a request for proposal from alternative suppliers which is something that that our firm can certainly help with um as well um so just kind of carrying on with these uh recommendations i kind of mentioned some of these already second point here is consider your appetite for risk and keep tabs on trends in the energy market so do you want to be fixing a price for a commodity long term into the future or would you rather would you rather kind of ride a variable rate there's ways that you can fix a portion of your rate and leave some of the some of the spend on like an index so consider that as your as you're looking into these things and then i mentioned this already consistently shop um at least a few different suppliers and compare them to the utility um and request uh 12 24 36 month pricing from alternative suppliers so you can see what kind of advantages you might be able to take long term into the future that is about it brett that's about all i had to go through um so we can take this time now for questions and answers and further discussion um and i'm happy to go back up and and look at different slides or go back into the dashboard and do more of a demonstration but um but yeah thank you everybody for uh taking the time and and listening to uh the presentation and we can open it up now yeah thanks brian we've got some questions coming in we've got some more time for questions for those of you who have to get going you are all set for your cu don't worry but stick around if you still want to keep having some conversations where do you get that ceu certificate check your spam um for customer care go to webinar if you don't see it pop up you'll see it there make sure to take the survey at the bottom of it for those of you watching this in the future on demand not right now make sure to take that quiz that 10 question quiz with an 80 passing rate you can find the quiz on our thinkific platform or whatever platform you're watching it on follow the instructions to take the quiz and before we get to those questions coming in a huge thanks to our board of directors all of our volunteers our new executive director and our top steer sponsors mitsubishi electric build equinox crv and reem all helping you get to net zero all electric in a healthy and safe uh way um and uh also before we get to the questions i did want to remind everybody uh just real quick um so one thing we are working on uh uh is is is working with landlord portals so a lot of times if your multi-family housing agencies you a lot of your utility companies will give you um access to your tenants utility day you may not know this and um you can get access to it and help make informed decisions about what the heck is going on in your building and more importantly we can take that information and as we do on our certification projects that we're working on and port them over to these fine folks who can help you make even further more informed decisions about that data um you know that is a great place to start so if you're if you don't have this kind of data and you're a landlord contact your utility company because you do have the rights to it in most cases across the country most of these landlord portals are the same portal being run by the same couple firms across the country through each utility um some concerns are privacy so we have been you know reaching out to the utility companies and saying look you know if you're giving third party agencies this don't give us names of the people in the building we don't need to know their names we just want to know the usage to what units so we can see oh this unit's having an issue there's a concern here how do we help them um and so that's one thing you know some folks are weary of that so look out for that and we've seen just recently some of the agencies and utilities change it um the other cool thing is again this data can be submitted to energy star portfolio manager which is one thing that you know brian's program can connect to or can go to them so then it can be shared with these agencies if they need to see the energy star scores and data and again that data should include dates and usage and cost gas electric and and maybe water usage so look out for those portals if you haven't seen them and ask your utility company to to give you um access to it um so you know i had a uh uh let's see we got a couple questions here um yeah so i see your question in here about community rates and i'm robert and i'm not quite sure exactly what you're asking so if you want to re-ask the specific question let me know and i will um i will i will put it out there um so in addition to bait and switch type supply offers that brian mentioned there are outright scammers out there be sure to check with your state's listing of authorized alternative suppliers uh so this more looks like more like a comment than a question but i mean brian i mean yeah there's i mean i assume you guys are helping weed those scammers out right yeah yeah exactly so the way that at foresight the way that we work is we're completely client-centric uh we would um we would conduct those rfps on behalf of our clients so we would uh we you know research the industry research the particular market if it's michigan or if it's somewhere else to understand who the reputable suppliers are who who are the um the marketers that have assets um and have you know built a good reputation in that particular market and then we we conduct the rfps and and see all the contracts review all those contracts understand the language and then make a recommendation to the client based on what supplier we think is uh has their best interest in mind um we don't have any exclusive relationships with suppliers we're completely agnostic as it relates to that we just want to work uh to get the best deal and and the one that makes most sense to our clients but uh yeah we we see it often where a new client for example signs up for our service we start gathering historical bills and then we see on one of the bills the name of a supplier that has you know a lot that lot them locked into some uh egregious price for um for a long duration of time and that's and that's where we um that's reason down with the client and do some of this explanation of like all right what's once this is up or what's contact the supplier and see if we can get out of this contract what's let's do some some homework to make sure that we avoid these costs great um so a question um you know can a community as a collective negotiate a rate much like community solar rather than negotiating rates on an individual basis have you seen that or been involved in that uh we haven't been involved in that to be honest but i have seen some of that or i've heard some rumblings around it around you know specifically with solar but also in smaller municipal areas and and co-ops so there's a lot of um within michigan and different territories that consumers in dte don't necessarily have jurisdiction over um they're smaller utilities like the holland bpw or lansing board of power and light or co-ops all throughout the state of indiana that that are really advocating for the um the people in that district and and hear and want to hear from them and how how they are using electricity and gas and and what types of uh things that the co-op could do to better support them so i'm thinking about you know these deregulated electricity markets you know i had some family that lived in texas they moved there um several years ago um and they sent me like a list of all the things they could pick from a la carte menu of you know what to pick when they signed up for electricity and they're like hey i wanted to send you this we thought you'd appreciate it you know what should we choose and i'm like don't ask me that question because i'll just say pick 100 renewables and you'll probably pay a lot of money so i think they they found some main they found some middle ground there but i'm wondering um as we're trying to you know make a shift um to go all renewable and electrify uh you know and and in so doing in some cases obviously to move away from gas to electricity you're significantly you know there's a there's a higher a lot of times a higher cost per unit of energy for now anyway on electricity rates over gas have you seen in these days have you have you seen these deregulation strategies that there might be people who offer certain rates as if you're on a heat pump for example where you can get a better deal through a third party based on not necessarily where you are your contract but really the actual technology that is you you know generating the energy for you that's a good question brett i there's been some of that um some utilities are offering more rates uh that are specific to the technology within the building um which i think i think that's what you're getting at right absolutely and i'm meaning more like yeah whether it's the utility or one of those like the guy knock on your door and he's like hey if you have a heat pump i mean that that's the guy i'm hoping knocks on my door someday but you know i can get you a better deal i'm a little biased but yeah right right yeah there's there's certainly more of that um happening in the industry our uh our the majority of the rate analysis that we're doing is um sort of using backward-looking data on how a facility is operating today and what they should be in now and then continually like staying engaged with that client to understand what type of building upgrades are are happening um so that we can then layer that into the future vein analysis that we do but we are i am seeing more of that our now analysts are seeing more more of that we're bringing that up to our clients and saying hey do you have um uh you know there's there's like outdoor lighting meters there's there's there are uh specific rates that deal with heat pumps i know so so there are some more specific uh rates based on technology that are uh that are coming out for sure um so obviously all these utility companies very diverse where they're at how you're dealing with them um so does that lend itself to to allow you to work in other countries uh do you do that have you looked into that or is it still are you still pretty much you know locked into the u.s most of yeah most of this work is being done here in the u.s but more and more as our client bases uh uh includes international buildings that they want to have us doing just the data collection piece on we're getting more of a purview into some specific ones mexico uh the uk each of which have this the uk specifically has very different parameters around renewables and how those renewable assets play into the electricity rates uh some of the requirements around that so so we're getting some more exposure into that and doing a lot of learning in that space right now great um well brian uh we are a little bit over our time but um i uh you know want to thank you for for joining us where can people go to learn more or contact you if they want to you know yeah just reach out and see what you see yeah definitely i'd say uh linkedin for sure um we do a lot of post foresight management does a lot of posting on linkedin and everybody on our team is is on there and pretty active so that'd be a good place to start um our website is a little bit of a word suit or letter soup i guess it's uh alphabet letter soup it's fsm gmt dot co so fs for foresight mgmt management dot co and we can uh you can go there and see a lot more information about what we're working on all right brian well thank you so much thanks to foresight for joining us and helping us to learn a little bit more here um and again just uh you know we love doing our webinars we're going to keep doing these every week everybody um but we would hope to start doing some sessions in person someday soon so do everything you can to help us get there and know that we can use ventilation and filtration and building science to solve many of our problems beyond just the pandemic so we hope that you'll help us spread that message to ventilate filter our buildings and move forward together and so be safe be healthy be well take care have a great rest of your week thanks everyone be sure to check out all of our courses available online that you can watch anytime and anywhere to pick up your ceus before you go make sure to subscribe to us on youtube to get weekly updates and stay up to date on green building science courses webinars and home tours thanks again