Energy Education builds customized, comprehensive people-driven energy conservation programs that help organizations reduce their consumption of electricity, natural gas, fuel oil, and water, allowing the financial savings which result to be invested in the lives of the people our clients serve, not utility companies. Our clients are school districts, institutions of higher education, and large churches that share a common commitment to fiscal and social responsibility, and the wise use of limited financial and environmental resources.
Program Overview
No doubt, ideas for saving energy are ubiquitous. Many utility companies, state organizations, and equipment manufacturers offer suggestions for saving energy, and we encourage our clients to take advantage of their ideas. In fact, institutions that employ a do-it-yourself approach to saving energy will typically save 0 – 7% off their utility costs.
What makes Energy Education’s program distinctive is that it typically saves several times what do-it-yourself programs yield. Most of our clients save 20 to 30% off their utility bills. Many save even more. In addition, Energy Education programs are maintained and sustained far longer than most in-house programs. Achieving this level of savings requires far more than coming up with a few more energy saving ideas, just as losing weight requires more than a longer list of ways to exercise. Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple. 
Our program is based on two very significant elements:
First, we offer our clients savings recommendations specific to their environment — hundreds and hundreds of them. Our team of several dozen experts and specialists rotate in and out of our clients’ campuses identifying saving solutions, large and small. A few of our recommendations can be found on websites for free. But hundreds more come from having assessed thousands of client facilities and applying well over 400 years of combined education and experience in energy management across numerous disciplines to our client’s situation.
Our expertise includes natural gas and electricity, water and sewer, HVAC systems, Energy Management Systems (EMS) and mechanical systems, behavior modification, communications, grounds care, data analysis, information systems management, organization development, construction management, human resources, utility rate structures, and many other areas of specialization that positively impact energy conservation. Our clients can not afford to bring this level of expertise in house, nor should they. Their focus is on education, so they depend on us to provide the expertise needed to implement a comprehensive energy management program.
Second, we offer a powerful, but complex implementation methodology to our clients. Our Transformational Energy Management® process involves four very specific and incredibly involved components. Here is a brief overview of each one:
- Assessment + Planning: We conduct onsite assessments that include examining every facility and area in our client’s environment and analyzing use and requirements at all hours of the day and night. We log temperature and humidity, and many other components important to equipment and facility use, and then teach our clients how to document their environment in a comprehensive fashion. Based on the data that is collected, we help our clients construct a detailed action plan that identifies priorities, savings opportunities, points of responsibility, optimized building scheduling profiles, proven implementation strategies and other elements critical to successful implementation.
- Coordination + Communication: Implementing a people-based energy saving program involves more than just sending out announcements. Saving energy at home may be possible by simply reminding your spouse and children to close the refrigerator door. But in a decentralized campus environment that supports people with very different backgrounds, areas of focus, personal concerns, levels of education, personalities, preferences, and so forth, coordination and communication efforts are exponentially more difficult. Our coordination efforts positively engage people. Our communication efforts involve constant reinforcement, generating customized messages on a broad and individual level, employing printed, digital, and face-to-face communication, facilitating effective meetings, and much more. Maximizing savings requires that everyone who consumes energy be engaged in understanding how to also save it.
- Leadership + Focus: Executing an effective energy saving program requires daily focused effort and someone who can make energy management a priority. So Energy Education helps its clients hire an Energy Education Specialist who will provide onsite leadership to their energy program. We know what to look for during the hiring process, and help our clients identify and hire the best candidate. We then go to great lengths to train the Energy Education Specialist to be successful. This includes multiple monthly onsite visits where our specialists and experts invest hundreds of hours in on-the-job training over the entire four-year contract period. Our training also includes three national client conferences/seminars every year, and assimilating a monthly implementation mailing that offers additional support and development.
- Measurement + Verification: One of the distinctions of Energy Education lies in the fact that our clients are responsible for measuring and verifying the efficacy of our work. While many equipment manufacturers and building contractors produce energy savings reports to their clients that reflect the results of their products and services, we believe the results of our program should be reported by our clients. That is why every one of our clients is a licensed user of EnergyCAP®, a third-party software product that calculates energy savings based on industry standards. EnergyCAP adjusts for load changes, facility changes, differences in billing periods, and weather differences to ensure all reported savings are attributable to our energy program. This approach to measurement and verification ensures full accountability and integrity, and gives both us and our clients confidence that we are delivering what we promised: real savings.
Energy Education’s fees are usually billed over several years. But our services are perpetual. As long as our clients continue to implement our energy savings program, we continue to support them. For example, if our client’s Energy Education Specialist ever leaves, even years after their last payment was made to Energy Education, we help them hire and train a new leader at no cost to the client. Our goal is to help our clients create and sustain their energy saving program long after we stop collecting fees.
And it’s working. We have hundreds of satisfied clients on our reference list. These clients understand that maximizing energy savings and positive environmental impact can only be accomplished with the support of a professional services company skilled in people-based energy conservation.
We are so convinced that our program will work, we offer a no-risk guarantee: if our clients do not save at least as much as they spend implementing our program, we write a check for the difference. In other words, when you implement our program, it is literally impossible to lose money in a relationship with Energy Education. In fact, more than 99% save well in excess of what they invest. If they didn’t, our clients’ boards and leadership staff would be smart enough to look somewhere else for savings and Energy Education would not have remained in business for 26 years.
It has been said that our people-based energy savings program is often underestimated in terms of the savings it generates. But it is also often underestimated in terms of its sophistication. Some organizations are producing minimal savings by implementing a few energy saving ideas, and that is certainly better than doing nothing. But to generate maximum savings where net spendable dollars are a multiple of what they can accomplish on their own requires not only hundreds of savings recommendations, but a comprehensive, proven implementation methodology like Energy Education’s Transformational Energy Management® process.
Learn More
Our hope is that this services brief has provided a better understanding of what we do for our clients and how we work to earn their business. Attempts to understand our program by reviewing long lists of energy saving tips are misguided, as they do not accurately reflect the full and true nature of our services or the value we offer our clients.
Consider this: Energy Education returns net new dollars for every dollar our clients invest in us. This is significant, especially when you realize their entire investment came from dollars they were already spending. By redirecting a small percentage of the district’s current utility budget to fund their energy savings program, a much greater share of the utility budget is recaptured and reinvested in teachers, books, curriculum, facility improvements, and other more important priorities.
For more information about our services, take a look at our risk-free guarantee, what makes Energy Education different, our unusual approach to measuring success (we don’t — you do!), and some of the common myths surrounding people-based energy conservation.