Energy management software (EMS) is a broad category of specialized technology solutions for understanding and managing an organization’s energy consumption and renewable production. EMS typically integrates with utility infrastructure to collect, monitor, analyze, and in some cases control energy consumption. But not all solutions do this equally well, at the same scale, or with the same underlying capabilities. Some focus on only electricity, gas, or water, while others track all utilities.
And because EMS centralizes the data needed to calculate emissions and produce sustainability disclosures, some solutions may have carbon accounting and sustainability reporting components.
Given the wide range of tools that can be considered energy management software, it’s not easy to confidently choose the solution that’s right for your organization.
Tango has helped enterprises, retailers, and government agencies manage their portfolios more cost effectively for nearly two decades. Below, we’ll walk you through the key benefits energy management software should provide, along with the specific features you should look for (and questions to ask) to ensure your choice has what you need.
Benefits of energy management software
Organizations rely on EMS solutions to provide greater clarity about their energy consumption and ultimately lower their energy costs. Here’s what you should expect to get from the best energy management software.
Reduced energy costs
With better visibility into your energy data and dashboards for monitoring and analyzing consumption, organizations can more easily identify cost savings opportunities and avoid billing errors or data discrepancies and anomalies. Energy management software can help you optimize energy consumption around your regular operations to eliminate wasteful energy usage, or recognize operations that would benefit most from more efficient practices or capital upgrades. This visibility can also enable you to optimize operations around a utility provider’s peak demand to secure lower contracted energy costs.
Simplified compliance
As regulators and financial institutions around the world continually push for greater transparency into corporate energy consumption, energy management software plays a key role in the reporting process. To comply with disclosure requirements and calculate emissions, organizations need to compile their energy data across all locations and operations. While some EMS solutions include carbon accounting and sustainability reporting capabilities, the data centralization they all provide is a crucial step toward compliance, and it’s significantly easier than manually aggregating the data you need in spreadsheets.
Improved risk management
Monitoring and controlling your energy consumption is an important part of sustainability risk management. By monitoring your energy use with historical analysis and/or real-time monitoring, you can identify or in some cases, be alerted to, anomalous energy consumption events that indicate a larger problem. You may recognize and correct human errors (like failure to shut down equipment) or detect breakdowns and operational issues that need to be corrected. And of course, optimizing your operations around a provider’s peak demand will help reduce the risk and impact of outages. EMS allows you to identify and mitigate these risks quickly
Now let’s look at the specific capabilities you’ll need to tap into these benefits.
Must-have energy management software features
EMS solutions provide varying degrees of visibility into energy data and control over your energy processes and infrastructure. As you explore your options, here are the capabilities you’ll need to reduce costs, simplify compliance, and improve risk management, as well as the questions you should use to evaluate your options.
Utility bill consolidation
Many of the greatest challenges with understanding and using your organization’s energy data stem from the fact that it’s distributed across multiple locations and providers. In order to analyze, monitor, audit, and report on your energy consumption, you have to manually piece together the data from these disparate sources and continually update it. The more locations you have, the bigger this problem grows.
Utility bill consolidation establishes a single source of truth for your energy data across your portfolio, making it easier to compare and analyze locations, operations, and costs. Ideally, this should happen with direct integrations between your EMS and each utility provider, allowing your software to automatically intake utility bills and incorporate them into a central database. Since utility providers often use different billing formats, Tango Energy & Sustainability even takes an extra step, standardizing your energy data to make it easier to analyze.
Key questions:
- Does the EMS centralize your utility data from all locations in a single filterable database?
- Can the software automatically intake utility bills, or will you have to manually upload each bill?
Energy bill auditing
Data accuracy is a significant challenge for sustainability reporting and compliance with disclosure requirements. Third-party data audits represent a significant expense (and time investment), but they’re essential for demonstrating the validity of your reporting. More sophisticated energy management software, however, can greatly reduce this expense by automatically auditing your data for common errors like duplicate data and gaps in billing periods. A human expert still has to validate your data, but your EMS can speed up the process by showing them where to focus their attention.
Key questions:
- What features does the energy management solution offer to improve your data accuracy?
- If your energy data has errors, how will that impact your database within the system?
Measurement and verification
Any time you invest in more efficient infrastructure or adopt new sustainability practices, you want to know that it’s actually generating savings. EMS should have dedicated features for analyzing the total dollar savings or cost avoidance, carbon impact, energy savings, and ROI of every sustainability project in your portfolio. Ideally, this should also feed into sustainability reports, making it easier to showcase your organization’s progress and performance.
Key questions:
- Does the solution have dedicated capabilities for recording and tracking sustainability practices and initiatives? How does it track the impact of your investments?
- Does the EMS connect measurement and verification insights to sustainability reporting?
Real time and interval monitoring
Your energy consumption and renewable production can vary widely from one day to another depending on your operations, the weather, and other factors. With direct connections to your utility providers and/or energy infrastructure, your EMS should enable you to analyze energy consumption by intervals like day, week, month, year, or billing period. This helps you recognize seasonal cost variations and identify anomalous consumption.
Key questions:
- What kinds of intervals can you use to analyze your energy data? Is it collected in real-time through connections to your utility providers and/or infrastructure?
- Does the solution track your renewable production and renewable energy credits?
Budgeting and forecasting
When your energy data and costs are readily available in a single database, a natural next step for EMS should be dedicated capabilities to set and monitor an energy budget for individual locations and your portfolio. And with historical data that accounts for the seasonality of your energy expenses, you can reliably forecast energy costs, too. Of course, energy usage and expenses also vary based on a wide range of factors, including weather, occupancy, retrofits, and the market—so a quality EMS should include models that can account for such variables, and/or the ability to recalculate forecasts when your actual costs change.
Key questions:
- Can you track your energy consumption against a budget within the EMS?
- What kinds of variables does the solution use when forecasting future energy expenses and demand?
Peak load management
Some utility providers like PJM, NYISO, and ISONE have “capacity charges,” which increase your supply rate based on the energy you consume during the grid’s peak load, when their infrastructure is under the greatest strain. If you operate as usual during these peak hours, it can lock you into a higher rate. With peak load management capabilities, your EMS can use predictive analytics to notify you when a provider’s grid is expected to peak. By reducing your consumption and planning operations around these periods, you can secure better rates and lower your expenses.
Key questions:
- How will the EMS solution help you navigate each provider’s peak load hours to optimize energy costs?
Control your energy costs with Tango Energy & Sustainability
Tango Energy & Sustainability combines energy management, carbon accounting, and sustainability reporting capabilities in a single tool. With Tango, your utility bills feed directly into a centralized database, where all energy data is automatically standardized and audited for common errors. This database becomes the backbone of advanced capabilities for reducing, monitoring, controlling, and reporting on your energy costs.
Want to see what Tango Energy & Sustainability can do for your organization?
Request a demo today.
