65 BUILDING PORTFOLIO AND A 15% ENERGY REDUCTION GOAL
The Challenge:
A mid-size municipality has 65 buildings and $400,000 to get started on a program to reduce their annual energy cost and consumption by 15% over 9 years.  They spent $5.3 million on energy last year and $6.1 million this year, a 13% increase, and energy costs are going up.

The Solution:
The strategy I used was a thorough evaluation of the energy footprint of all 65 buildings, development of a ranking system, comprehensive energy audits of as many buildings as we could fit into the budget, and an energy reduction plan to roll into the municipality's long term facility and capital budget plans.  Here were the steps:

1. Perform a benchmark energy study.
Gather 2 years consumption and cost data for each building, validate the building's size, function and age.  Tabulate the data and perform a ranking algorithm to identify the building's with the highest potential cost savings. 

2. Review, select and perform energy audits.
With municipal stakeholders, the ranked list was reviewed and specific building's were selected based on political, economic and functional perspectives.

21 buildings were audited over 6 months.  $990,000 in energy cost savings were identified, resulting in a 35% annual cost reduction, with an average payback of 3.8 years.

3. Optimize energy retrofit measures.
To stretch retrofit costs, we created an implementation matrix so contractors like electrical, mechanical HVAC, could bid the upgrades across all 21 buildings, rather than on a building by building basis.  This also allowed the municipality to identify which type of upgrades would give them the biggest "bang for their buck" across their entire portfolio, and bring unaudited buildings into the mix.

4. Targeted narrow energy audits and building monitoring.
The proposed final step was to perform narrow energy audits on the other buildings, focused on the highest ROI areas (typically HVAC controls and lighting) identified in the implementation matrix.  Additionally, a basic energy monitoring system was proposed for all buildings, to allow facility staff to identify and correct system inefficiencies as they arise.