This blog post is written by Maggie Zeh, a senior at Rock Canyon High School that is working with Lotus as part of her senior career exploration coursework. Maggie is passionate about the environment and interested in pursuing a career in sustainability.
Read MoreWhen developing a climate action plan, or when embarking on any community or organizational planning process, engaging stakeholders in a meaningful way ensures that the most relevant groups and individuals are aware and supportive of your process. When done correctly, stakeholder engagement processes may reveal new opportunities for implementing impactful strategies, programs, and projects.
Read MoreBy Emily Artale and Hillary Dobos
There are skeptics everywhere. How do we, as energy and sustainability professionals, convince them that pursuing sustainability is not only the right thing to do, but it can also be profitable?
One approach has been to share the dozens of case stories of big businesses and progressive municipalities saving money through sustainability initiatives (think Dow Chemical, Interface, City of Boulder, City of San Francisco, King County, etc…). But, for some reason these stories do not always result in a massive buy-in of sustainability and sometimes you may even lose the attention of your audience.
And why does this happen? Perhaps these stories do not provide a roadmap that is relevant to the values, demographics, location, and other unique factors of the community that you are speaking to.
Read MoreBy Emily Artale and Hillary Dobos
One of the first steps of any successful energy management program should be an analysis and review of your building’s utility data. This is one way in which your building tells a story of its performance. We, as Energy Managers, use this story to verify personal narratives of your building’s operation, evaluate opportunities for improvement, identify patterns and trends of energy consumption, and benchmark against similar facilities. And, sometimes we can use this data to identify immediate solutions for cost savings.
How can such a seemingly simple resource provide so much valuable information? Utility data is objective and accurate; it documents actual consumption values and actual costs with an infallible memory. It can tell us when the building becomes occupied, when the building is reaching its peak demand, and when abnormalities in use and costs occur.
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