Energy Accounting & Portfolio Manager

Challenges of Energy Accounting

The quality and completeness of state agencies’ energy use data in Portfolio Manager is not as good as it should be for a number of reasons:

• Budget cuts limit staff and resources that can be reasonably made available to compile, submit, analyze energy use data; recent state budget cuts in response to the Covid 19 virus’ impact on the economy may exacerbate this
• Many buildings lack utility meters, so energy use can only be prorated among a set of buildings on a campus based on square footage. This can be quite inaccurate due to variations in energy use intensity of the buildings (e.g. a warehouse versus a data center or medical center). OFM estimates that in 2017 80% of 26.1 million square-feet of agency owned buildings are on campuses lacking individual meters on most of the buildings
• Many agencies have not input sufficient building data (such as occupancy, schedule, and number of computers for each building) that is required for the calculation of ENERGY STAR scores
• Some utilities are less willing and able to provide energy use data in a useful form
• Some buildings are served by district steam systems that are not metered