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Calculate: Assess Your Savings Potential!
You can't see energy, so it can be difficult to visualize the potential savings lying undiscovered in your facility. However, you can see and easily understand those utility bills you receive each month. Visualize your energy bill being lower by 25 to 30 percent, or even more. Visualize your potential energy savings as financial resources that could go to worthwhile programs instead of to your local utility.
Clearly managing energy use makes good financial sense as well as helping the environment, but remember, "you can't manage what you can't measure." Your facility's energy use for lighting, heating, cooling, office equipment and other systems can be easily identified, measured and analyzed. The result is a new and interesting look at your facility - where simple identification and measurement techniques provide the first steps toward eliminating waste and saving money. You can begin the process today by pulling out your utility bill file and looking at what you are paying each month and each year for energy with the knowledge that you can reduce energy waste and reclaim much of the money you are paying out for energy.
ENERGY STAR's Portfolio Manager provides a platform to track energy and water use trends as compared with the costs of these resources. It helps you streamline your portfolio's energy and water data, and track key consumption, performance, and cost information portfolio-wide.
Other resources to identify how your energy use compares to that of similar type facilities.
- Lawrence Berkley National Laboratories’ ARCH: A Building Energy Reference Tool
- DOE Building Technologies Program: Building Energy Software Tools Directory
