The larger your portfolio, the harder it is to manage your energy costs with varying policies, utility portals, and billing structures. Costly problems arise and inefficiencies persist due to lack of visibility and poor data quality. Dedicated energy management software (EMS) is designed to address this problem by monitoring and controlling your energy consumption at scale. If your organization has never used it before, it may seem hard to justify the added expense.
The reality is that energy management software can pay for itself many times over by giving you tools to avoid immediate costs, like billing errors or anomalies, and reduce long-term energy expenses. One enterprise customer of ours saved more than $600,000 in unnecessary energy-related costs through a single EMS capability. And there are several EMS capabilities that can yield savings.
Here are five ways an EMS, like Tango Energy & Sustainability, helps lower your organization’s operating expenses.
How energy management software reduces costs
Energy management software is purpose-built to give you greater visibility into your energy data and infrastructure, with specific capabilities that enable you to lower energy costs, avoid overpayments, and reduce waste.
1. Alerting you to anomalous energy usage
When you rely on workers or utility bills to discover anomalous energy usage, problems can persist for hours, days, or even weeks before they’re discovered. Machinery could be left running when it’s not in use, equipment could have component failures, or you could simply be billed incorrectly.. Leaving these problems unaddressed can lead to broken equipment, wasted resources, safety hazards, avoidable cost hikes, and other issues.
Tango Energy & Sustainability connects your utility bill data to your smart meters and submeter data to give you a complete picture of your energy usage in real-time. It alerts you when energy consumption is abnormally high for a time and location, letting you investigate the cause before it results in exorbitant costs or energy waste. You can customize alert parameters in Tango, so you only get notified of the events that truly need your attention.
2. Empowering you to secure better rates with peak load management
Every day, local energy demand reaches peak levels that put greater strain on a utility provider’s infrastructure. Some providers, such as PJM, NYISO, and ISONE, use capacity charges to apply different supply rates based on how much energy customers use during these hours. In some cases, up to 40% of your regular rate may be based on these peak-hour contributions. Unfortunately, you often don’t know when those peak hours are, making it impossible to optimize your operations around them.
Since energy management software like Tango integrates with your utility providers, it can use load forecasting and additional analysis to estimate when an independent system operator (ISO) will likely peak. To give you time to shift consumption and secure lower rates, Tango notifies you about upcoming peak load hours before they happen.
Cost impact: Depending on the territories you operate in, optimizing around your providers’ peak loads could reduce a location’s energy bill by up to 30%.
3. Identifying costly billing errors
Utility bills are notoriously inaccurate. Every month, you’re bound to be erroneously overcharged. Depending on the scale of your operations, you could be overpaying by hundreds of thousands of dollars—our EMS identified more than $600,000 in overcharges for one of our customers. Tango automatically audits your data for common errors like duplicate billing periods, but you also have the ability to establish a standard usage variance or cost variance and flag bills that fall outside of those parameters for your review.
Left undetected, billing errors like incorrect taxes and discrepancies between meter data and billing data cause you to pay more than you need to for regular operations. EMS ensures you don’t overpay, giving you a reliable way to maintain better alignment between your energy consumption and expenses.
4. Saving time on carbon accounting
Carbon accounting requires you to regularly calculate and report on your operation’s Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. These calculations are based on hundreds of factors defined by the EPA that can change each year, including criteria like fuel types, types of combustion, vehicle types, and vehicle models and years. Keeping track of current emissions factors and incorporating them into your calculations for each location and area of operation is tedious and time consuming, but Tango Energy & Sustainability can automatically:
- Keep your emissions factors up-to-date
- Calculate Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions in accordance with disclosure requirements
- Generate and submit fully compliant sustainability reports that follow the most-used standards
This adds up to significant ongoing time savings, reducing the workload carbon accounting represents to your accounting and sustainability teams.
Cost impact: By automatically tracking Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions and generating sustainability reports, our EMS can save customers hundreds of accounting hours per year.
5. Simplifying compliance and reducing risk
Different states, countries, and industries have adopted different climate disclosure requirements and sustainability regulations. So you can’t necessarily take a standardized approach to sustainability across your portfolio. Some locations need to comply with different regulations than others, which means keeping track of distinct deadlines, audit requirements, and penalties.
Tango Energy & Sustainability identifies the compliance requirements for each of your locations based on applicable laws and regulations, highlighting the steps you need to take, deadlines to meet, and consequences for non-compliance. This helps ensure your long-term operational stability by providing greater clarity around compliance, so obligations don’t fall through the cracks, and you aren’t on the hook for unforeseen penalties.
Monitor the impact of sustainability investments
The more you can connect sustainability investments and capital programs to actual cost savings and waste reductions, the easier it is to justify similar projects in the future. But without clear, convenient visibility into the before and after energy consumption, costs, and emissions for each program, it can be hard to connect that LED retrofit, HVAC improvement, or window upgrade to a tangible impact.
Tango’s EMS doesn’t just help you reduce costs—it helps you track and report on sustainability initiatives through dedicated Measurement and Verification (M & V) dashboards and analysis capabilities. We measure and verify projects using IPMVP and ASHRAE Guideline 14-2014, giving you reliable clarity into every project’s value to your organization.
Reduce operating costs with Tango Energy & Sustainability
Tango Energy & Sustainability is purpose-built energy management software that centralizes and standardizes your energy data. It’s a single source of truth for energy insights for your whole portfolio and individual locations. With direct connections to your utility providers and energy infrastructure, Tango helps you identify anomalous usage, detect billing errors, optimize around peak load hours, automate carbon accounting, and track compliance risks.
Want to see what Tango Energy & Sustainability can do for you?
Request a demo today.
