Is Your Building Portfolio Safe from the Next Spike in Energy Prices?
Recent declines in oil and natural gas prices are good news for utility customers, but the volatile nature of the oil and gas markets means that you can’t count on these costs to stay at their current low levels. Sooner or later, energy prices will rise again, creating havoc in building owners’ operational budgets.
You might assume there’s little you can do to protect your portfolio from energy cost increases. After all, you are at the mercy of market prices, right?
Actually, there’s a lot you can do to mitigate the risk of rising energy costs. To begin, you need to stop looking at your building’s energy usage in the typical “top-down” way — that is, looking at energy costs solely in terms of fluctuating supply and demand cycles in the oil and natural gas markets. Instead, you need to flip your view and look at your building’s energy usage from the “bottom-up”. In other words, you need to look at your building’s unique energy-usage profile and demand.
This is the approach that ETS takes with its Fast Trak energy cost savings programs for commercial and multifamily buildings. To provide a plan that is matched to your building’s unique energy profile and create the greatest possible cost savings, ETS combines the following elements:
- Smart building and state-of-the-art energy technologies
- Concierge services that help train operations staff in energy-saving behaviors
- Portfolio price protection
- Energy auditing and conservation benchmarking
It all starts with smart interval meters. Interval metering provides data that shows your building’s unique energy profile, or signature. This profile tells you details such as your building’s energy demand throughout the day and other time periods, its base load and peaks, and what mechanical equipment is responsible for energy demand.
With this information, ETS can right-size an energy management plan and devise a price-protection strategy that will minimize the financial exposure of your building or portfolio to rising energy costs.
ETS matches actual usage calibrated from utility-approved interval meter data with real wholesale market pricing to create a price-protection strategy that mitigates your market price exposure. With this approach, you have control. You no longer have to try to anticipate what the market will do and react to it.
[cta]Want to make your building energy efficient but don’t know where to start? ETS can help! Contact us to learn more and request a feasibility study.[/cta]
