Energy costs can be a major line item for school and university administrators. Heating, cooling, and creating comfortable learning environments is costly. According to the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Better Buildings initiative, K-12 facilities alone spend $8 billion annually on energy—their largest direct expense after teachers’ salaries.
Those high monthly bills can also be difficult to decipher. Finance teams may see costs rising without understanding what’s driving the increase or how to manage them effectively. They can compare their buildings’ bills to those of similar organizations to try to glean insights, but since no two buildings are exactly alike, looking only at those gross totals also makes it difficult. What’s needed is a common denominator to help enable apples-to-apples comparisons with similar facilities, even if they differ in size or other characteristics. This is where calculating energy costs per square foot and benchmarking become extremely valuable. After all, as the saying goes, “you can’t manage what you don’t track.”
Finding a point of comparison with benchmarking
For schools and universities, facilities evolve over time, with buildings, systems, and controls of various ages that weren’t necessarily designed to work together. For facility operators who rely on these legacy systems and practices, it’s very easy to overlook potential opportunities to create savings without affecting comfort.
However, by performing simple division to determine your annual cost per square foot, you can easily understand how well your buildings are performing against others in your area. This is the first step down a path to:
- Understanding your building’s energy use
- Learning where future efficiency upgrades are needed
- Providing a baseline for evaluating future efficiency investments
Energy Star benchmarking
Determining your facility’s Energy Star score is great way to establish baselines and benchmarks for future improvement. Energy Star’s benchmarking program uses basic information about your properties to create an energy performance score.
With that score, you can compare your facility’s energy use to that of other buildings that match yours in age, geography, size, and other factors. In this way, you’re really comparing like for like when considering how effective future efficiency measures could be in bringing down your energy bills.
Through working with schools, which often have limited financial resources and require strategic cost management, I have found that ENERGY STAR certification is an excellent way for superintendents and school boards to:
- Show responsible financial management and build credibility with the tax base
- Identify potential savings opportunities
- Find incentive dollars to offset improvement costs
- Provide tangible proof of efficient operations
- Potentially redirect energy savings to other educational priorities
Valuable—and comfortable—savings
In my experience, customers are often pleasantly surprised by their energy savings. Benchmarking exercises, identifying key areas for improvement, and making targeted modifications can make real impacts. By incorporating modern sensors and controls, building performance can align with efficiency targets—often with immediate impact. I’ve seen savings range from $0.10 to over $1 per square foot, with an average around $0.26 per square foot annually. And those savings begin as soon as modernized equipment is in place.
Today’s advanced devices can significantly reduce the guesswork and missed savings opportunities associated with day-to-day building management. For example, vacancy sensors can respond to real-time conditions instead of pre-set schedules. So if a meeting is cancelled with little notice, the empty conference room remains uncooled. If a last-minute meeting is called, a push of a button can trigger the cooling system into action.
It’s also important to note that savings aren’t the result of simply adjusting thermostat setpoints. Those setpoints often don’t change—improving efficiency is much different than enforcing conservation. Instead, improvements are focused on:
- Aligning operations to occupancy
- Supplying heating and cooling only where and when they’re needed
- Automatically scaling back when spaces are unoccupied
- No need for complicated scheduling systems
For example, a recent customer reported a 90% reduction in maintenance calls to address room temperature complaints after applying efficiency measures.
Let’s connect!
At Alpha Controls, we have helped 55 K-12 school buildings generate over $27,000,000 for education. Please reach out if you’d like to learn more about how to get started benchmarking your facility’s operations. It could be the first step toward lowering your organization’s energy costs and improving both efficiency and comfort throughout your buildings.
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