Today’s utility bill management and energy services and software market showcases a number of differentiated solutions, each addressing the nuances of the different industries they serve and possessing their own distinct set of business challenges. As the market grows more complex due to higher volumes of data, the pressure for energy solutions providers to turn these numbers into meaningful insights for their customers is becoming increasingly important.

Our panel discusses the various challenges energy soluutions providers have seen and dealt with and dives into the ways in which these companies are innovating to enhance the value they bring to their customers.

THE PANEL:

Chris Happ, CEO

Mark Raisor, Chief Operating Officer

Joe Aamidor, Senior Product Manager

Francis Quinn, Director of Sustainability Technologies

RESOURCES

EXPERT Q&A:

EMERGING CHALLENGES FOR ENERGY SOLUTIONS PROVIDERS

1

For the full panel, please refer to Urjanet’s video, “Emerging Energy Management Challenges”

What energy management problems are you trying to solve for your customers? Are you seeing your customers increasingly focus on energy reduction?

WORKIVA: Our customers come to us because they need help organizing all of their energy and sustainability data for reporting and turning data into something that has meaningful value. They are looking to engage their stakeholders and need to transform metric data into information that can guide business strategies.

There is a notion that you will save money by turning off the lights because your electricity bill will go down. However, the inherent value of data our customers collect goes way beyond this. The value is not only financial, but also non-financial because it can help improve energy management methodologies and lead to success that can build reputation and increase brand value.

What challenges have you faced with getting your hands on building data and integrating that data into your software applications?

LUCID: Aggregating all the data is a very real challenge. To give some background, Lucid is an energy management software provider. I’ll define the problem that really started the company. About 10 years ago at Oberlin College, a couple of students and their professor were working in an environmental sciences building. The building had a LEED platinum rating and should have been one of the most efficient buildings in the world at that time. However, after about a year, the students and professor found out that the building was actually twice as inefficient, or in other words, used twice as much energy as all the other building on campus did. They wondered what was going on and discovered that the way to really save energy was to engage the occupants. Thus, Lucid started as a dashboard company, giving real-time metering visibility to occupants. The dashboard displayed how much energy the occupants were saving in a way that everyone could understand. For example, the dashboard would show the dollars saved in terms of the price of pizza. The students understood the difference between using 100 pizzas per night versus 50.

Since then, there has been a lot of research that has

shown that real-time data really drives efficiency because it’s more compelling, interesting, and enticing. What we find challenging is that many buildings use different systems and connecting to all of these systems is difficult. We see that organizations may know that they have different systems across the board but do not really understand where all of their data resides.

What challenges are you seeing in the commercial real estate space to acquire historical data for benchmarking?

GOBY: To give a bit of context, Goby was founded in 2008 as an energy and sustainability consulting firm focused on commercial real estate. We quickly realized that we were capturing a lot of data and the same data points had to move to many different places. Therefore, we built a platform that basically supports our consulting group. We landed on this motto of “capture once, report anywhere.”

New York City was one of the first cities to pass an energy benchmarking law. This caused many real estate owners to turn to ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager and a number of service providers to respond to this market direction by offering more benchmarking platforms and tools. The market was incentivized to cost-effectively deliver just what the ordinance asked. We realized that we needed service professionals to provide quality service so that building managers and owners could define a baseline for their energy consumption. We ourselves even needed the data to validate to our customers how we helped them improve their energy efficiency since their initial audit.

What are the data challenges that your large manufacturing customers have experienced?

ENTERSCAPE: EnterScape specializes in companies that are fairly large. Our clients range from companies that own one metal facility that has literally 2 miles of production lines to companies that manufacture 178 semi-trailers a day in 3 million square feet of space. The challenge these

2

“Helping manufacturers identify opportunities for cost savings starts with capturing the data.”

3

companies face is collecting all the energy data and getting it into one central location. To address this challenge, we’ve worked with lots of hardware vendors and created a system that can pick up data points from any specific point in the manufacturing process. For example, we can capture the energy usage data from individual production lines and water usage data from individual valves.

When we combine this data with Urjanet data, we can show our clients how much each of their machines or parts of their operating process cost. They can see exactly how much money goes into each production line. Helping manufacturers identify opportunities for cost savings starts with capturing the data.

How do you address manufacturing companies’ challenges knowing that a one-size-fits-all solution will rarely be applicable?

ENTERSCAPE: Our process is to go in and spend quite a bit of time learning about a company’s specific manufacturing business. We meet with the different stakeholders including operators, maintenance people, and the people who are driving the strategy to really understand what their goals are. Then on the data side, we bring in either our engineers or a consultant to look at the information we gathered and to collect even more data for analysis. At first glance, a 2-megawatt arc furnace that melts 50,000 pounds of steel may appear to be the best place to start to look for savings. However, when you find that there are 100 other pieces of equipment in a production line in a factory that are running 24 hours a day, when the arc furnace only runs 2 hours a day, you might realize that your initial opinion was way off. You really need someone who is an expert on a particular industry and who can begin to collect data and identify areas for savings that many may have missed.

How do you help your customers understand their data and then use that data to take certain actions?

WORKIVA: We help our customers by understanding the nuances within their particular industry and then forming expert groups and forums to help customers decide how to best present their data. From there, we build out all of the different templates they need and style their dashboards to their liking. Beyond that, we also provide a service whereby we can take the company’s financial data and start directly tying it into their sustainability data. Their sustainability data can include electricity, water, waste, human resources, and more. Connecting the data allows you to build a business narrative that can then be acted upon by senior management.

GOBY: One of the most interesting things that we’ve seen is the gamification piece. We can take real-time, whole building data, normalize it, and then stack rank each building against the rest. When different facility managers see the results, they become more competitive with each other and aim to reduce energy consumption more than the others do. We’ve noticed an 8% to 12% drop in energy usage just by presenting the data in a normalized fashion. It is important to at least get the basic data, like utility bill information, because it’s not too expensive at this point. When we get a comprehensive set of data, we can make a lot more predictions and point people in the right direction.

ENTERSCAPE: We try to help our clients identify a knock-your-socks-off project right out of the gate. One challenge we see is that there can be a lot of disparity in people’s opinions, from the CEO down to the maintenance worker. However, everyone can agree that saving money and reducing water or electricity usage is a good thing. We initially try to identify a project that gets everybody on the same page.

For example, one of our clients, for whom we monitor electricity and gas, mentioned how high their water bills seemed recently. So, we decided to put in submeters throughout the building to figure out what was going on. After we collected the data for about 3 months, we found that 98% of the water usage was going to one room in the back (the water treatment area). We then compared the 9 million gallons of water per year used in this room to the 2

“Connecting the data allows you to build a business narrative that can then be acted upon by senior management.”

4

million gallons of water per year used in the same type of room for a similar building. By advising them to put in some controls on their cooling towers, we helped them reduce their consumption by 5 million gallons. No one complained about that! The CFO has seen enormous cuts in his bills and the plant managers are happy about the project as well. Getting everybody on the same page and finding a really great project to start the relationship is what we like to do.

LUCID: We recently had a meeting with a large company in the Bay Area. A facility manager, an energy manager, a couple of people from the energy management group, and someone from the sustainability department were all there. During this meeting, the facility manager asked us a number of challenging questions about the differentiation and value we could provide. From his point of view, he had everything he needed since all of his buildings were actually on the same building automation system.

However, discovered during the course of the meeting that no one else in the room even had access to the data because it was disconnected from other systems and applications. The rest of the group wanted visibility into the energy data and to know when the buildings were running or on down time. Another piece of information we found was that not all of the facilities were actively managed. We were then able to pinpoint where additional savings could be made. This company liked that we were able to enable data-sharing, which helped them make decisions about how and when to use energy. By democratizing the information, you get better outcomes.

Many municipalities now require an ENERGY STAR rating for buildings. What impact have you seen this have in cities such as Chicago, D.C., and New York City?

GOBY: As the ENERGY STAR Partner of the Year last year, we have some insights. There is this notion that everyone has big data and access to big data, but

what we actually found is that the real estate vertical is very siloed. You would have someone tracking it in an Excel spreadsheet in one way and then reporting on it differently. Despite the data access issue, Portfolio Manager has come a long way. It’s certainly not perfect and you can poke holes in it, but it’s a benchmarking tool that will take your building type and attributes and try to normalize them as best it can for data centers, retail shops, and other types of stores. We found that Portfolio Manager got everyone’s data into one place. Everything had a level playing field, so we could start to look at the data, even though it wasn’t very granular.

Here is further validation of ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager’s success. The city of Chicago, where our headquarters is, was putting together an ordinance similar to the one in New York City. The city tried to find a benchmarking tool that was better than Portfolio Manager, but was unsuccessful. We realized that Portfolio Manager is run by the EPA, so there really is no commercial interest per se. It was the best we had and the most widely adopted. Even though it has had its challenges and is not perfect, I think that it is helpful as a base entry platform and that it is the most commonly tool used.

In fact, I was recently at a conference that focused on energy and sustainability in real estate. They took a poll and 100% of the people at the conference had used ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager to benchmark. As people had gotten past their initial energy assessments, they had adopted some other platform. It was pretty telling that Portfolio Manager was the starting place for all of the energy benchmarking out there. A study in the Journal of International Money and Finance showed that real estate companies that were more heavily benchmarked in the ENERGY STAR application actually outperformed the market because of increased operational efficiency.

LUCID: ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager really does get people talking about energy and building performance. It provides a few core energy metrics that allow you to look across the portfolio and make comparisons. Using Portfolio Manager can spark the desire to invest in more advanced energy management software. It becomes a compelling way to begin a conversation and allows you to look back at historic data. We find that the historic data is very important to validating an energy efficiency project.

“One of the most interesting things that we’ve seen is the gamification piece.”

5

We also see that new regulations are driving more people to ENERGY STAR. More cities are requiring all buildings over a certain square footage to report on their energy consumption each year. They are looking to calculate an average ENERGY STAR score within the city and sometimes even specific scores for smaller areas. The fact that this information is public further incentivizes building owners to examine their buildings’ energy usage and make improvements. I have definitely seen an increasing number of conversations about ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager since these municipal regulations began.

Do you see a need for firms to be able to benchmark themselves against similar companies? How do you see this developing?

ENTERSCAPE: Fortunately, the Department of Energy produces some data based on different types of manufacturing, so there are some benchmarking tools out there. One of EnterScape’s goals is to help other companies within the manufacturing sector benchmark and understand their energy consumption. We’ve worked with a lot of different companies that use injection molders and now we have specific data on the injection molding business. For them, about 60% of their energy use goes into their products and 40% of their energy is consumed by facilities or other areas. Because we have this information, we can talk to different injection molders about what we have seen in their industry and how they compare to the standard.

I strongly advise both internal and external benchmarking. Sometimes companies will overlook their flaws and might not see things that they could be doing better.

For example, EnterScape submetered four individual production lines that were producing steel to make automotive springs for a plant in Florence, Kentucky. This particular plant makes about 70,000 springs per day. Shortly after we had submetered the four production lines and had sent a report to our client, I received a phone call. The manager said that the two lines that were using 36% more energy than the other two were the new ones that they had bought from Germany. They were supposed to be even more efficient than the older lines. He explained that the two lines were using 36% more energy but only producing 4% more output. This is an example

of how we uncovered an unknown inefficiency. We didn’t know whether the company was running those lines differently than they were running the others, but we gave them the data so that they could make the necessary changes.

How do investors take sustainability into account?

WORKIVA: It usually depends on the perspective of an individual investor. For example, investors focusing on pension funds, which have a minimum of a 25-year timescale, look at different sustainability metrics than investors who are interested in short-term real estate investments do.

Where do you look for inspiration? How do you compare yourself to other companies?

WORKIVA: We benchmark ourselves against companies that we are competitive with and those that we strive to be like. When I was running sustainability at L’Oreal, we benchmarked ourselves against the companies we felt were simply the absolute best. It was part of our mantra to be better than the best. We would find a category that we wanted to improve, find companies that excelled in this category, and continue to benchmark ourselves against those companies, regardless of what type they were.

How important is it to ensure that the data you collect is accurate and comprehensive?

GOBY: I was at a Bloomberg conference recently that was focused on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG). It stressed collecting data from public real estate investment trusts because numerous investors were seeking this information. I thought to myself that if people are going to make investment-grade decisions on the data, it better be accurate. Today, the energy side is probably a bit ahead of the water and waste sides. Those are certainly three major focus areas. I think we will see the data accuracy improve and a platform like Urjanet can be quite helpful there.

ENTERSCAPE: You have to have accurate data. We

“If people are going to make investment-grade decisions on the data, it better be accurate.”

are a data company that uses submeters and our data means everything. You live or die by the data. When we started the company four years ago, we gathered data for a university that we were working closely with on developing our product. We jumped the gun on showing them the information before we had fully checked it for errors. Unfortunately, we realized we had used an incorrect factor in our computation, so the data wasn’t right. We learned our lesson after that.

LUCID: I think data accuracy is moving in the right direction. Years ago, having an energy management software product meant that you had a way for someone to key in the utility bills. We’ve come a long way from that. I would say that on the submetering side, when you’re trying to give your clients real-time data, you want to make sure it’s correct. At the same time, you deal with a number of challenges. If a meter goes offline or flatlines for a certain period of time, the data will become inaccurate. Sometimes you come across meters that aren’t reporting data and you don’t figure that out until three or four days have already passed. Being able to deliver that type of information quickly is crucial.

What are the key innovations within your applications or services?

LUCID: There have been innovations that have made light bulbs and thermostats IP addressable that haven’t quite reached the commercial space yet. That’s one of the few cases I’ve seen in which innovation on the residential side has outperformed that on the commercial side. Lucid has an opportunity to connect to more devices and equipment and pull all of them into one place for better organization. There is a ton of opportunity to manage energy and bring those innovations to the

commercial building space.

ENTERSCAPE: Our greatest innovation is Urjanet. EnterScape specializes in submetering and getting down into the details, while Urjanet specializes in bill and financial data. When we combine these two forces, the results are impressive. I really do think the greatest thing for us right now is Urjanet.

GOBY: We’re trying to look at an abundance of data and find unique ways to use the data. It’s pretty easy to get the scope 1 and scope 2 carbon emissions of a building because we are basically summing everything that’s consumed in the running of the building. It’s much harder to figure out the additional part of the carbon footprint that is created by all of the people who end up in the building. Instead of polling everybody, we’ve actually found a company that buys scrub cell phone data that can basically track your GPS. With this insight, we are able to discern how everybody gets to work, what path they take, and what mode of transportation they use. Therefore, we are able to quickly and accurately calculate the entire carbon footprint of the building for a carbon emissions report.

WORKIVA: I have one answer that applies to today and one answer the applies to the future. I would say that for today, the innovation that drives us is what we call our Factbook, which is the one source of truth. It is a secure, singular place that holds all of your financial and non-financial data and allows you to do all the analysis you need to then communicate your progress internally and externally. You can easily measure how well you’re doing. A key innovation for us in the future will be semantic data modeling. This refers to making the data more accessible to and more easily understood by non-experts, so that they can still get the meaningful answers they need.

6

ABOUT URJANET

Urjanet’s mission is to provide the world with easy access to automated energy data. Our cloud-based platform seamlessly extracts and normalizes disparate utility bill and interval data directly from the source, and delivers it into the business systems and products that rely on it. Leading commercial enterprises and energy solutions providers use Urjanet data to gain deeper insight into energy consumption and spend. Urjanet is a privately-held company headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. For more information, visit www.urjanet.com.