The U.S. Department of Energy hosted the webinar, 50001 Ready Utility Network Series: Recognition Processes, in September 2020. DOE has revised the 50001 Ready Navigator online tool and its process for submitting for 50001 Ready recognition and re-recognition. These revisions include a more streamlined submission process and a clarification of submission requirements. This webinar provides a guided review of the 50001 Ready recognition and re-recognition process and a walk through of all the tools to help support your customers with understanding the recognition requirements, and in submitting and maintaining active DOE 50001 Ready recognitions for their sites. In addition, Michael Stowe of Advanced Energy shares how he incorporates DOE’s 50001 Ready suite of tools into existing SEM program offerings to provide 100% remote training to 50001 Ready cohorts across the country. View the webinar video.
This webinar is part of DOE’s 50001 Ready Utility Network Series, a forum for utilities, public benefit administrators (PBA’s), third party implementers, consultants, and regulators who share an interest in energy management systems (EnMS) including ISO 50001 and DOE’s 50001 Ready program. Explore 50001 Ready resources tailored to utilities, implementers, and energy service providers.
Transcription
Amy Pevzner: Good morning, everyone. My name is Amy Pevzner - I'm with the Berkeley Lab. And we have Ethan Rogers here, and our guest for today is Michael Stowe from Advanced Energy. So, with that, Ethan, if you'd like to take it away?
Ethan Rogers: Sure, thank you Amy. Well, we've got a couple things planned for today in our webinar series. We're going to go over the recognition process. It hasn’t changed a whole lot from before, but we thought that'd be good to do a refresher on this, and talk about the process for submitting recognition by DOE for completing the 25 Ready tasks, and how the re-recognition process goes. And then we're going to turn it over to Mike Stowe of Advanced Energy, and he’s going to share how he's been doing - incorporating the 50001 Ready tools into the strategic energy management programs that they've been offering to different training – cohorts across the country, and having some really good success with it. Now, a lot of the work he's done has been virtual too, because of the challenges of 2020.
Ethan Rogers: Ready recognition is only available to sites in the United States, the U.S. Department of Energy, is – I guess you could say it has a very broad scope of activities, and things that they can do. But in this particular case, it is limited to just recognizing facilities within the United States. The recognition is good for one year, and to maintain your recognition status, you need to re-attest on an annual basis. And so, we're going to cover this, as well as the self-attestation forms, the energy performance improvement report, and how to upload that to the 50001 Navigator, and those types of things. And you’ll see here there's a little bit different between the first-time annual recognition and the subsequent annual recognition. Of course, the most important thing is that you create an account, with the Navigator, right? You know, within the Ready program, and you set yourself up and energy management system. And you work your way through the 25 tasks, you're checking them off as you go. And ideally, you know, you'll complete all 25 tasks. And if this is of interest to you, you can submit for recognition by the U.S. Department of Energy. And to do that, you fill out a self-attestation form, and then you submit an energy performance improvement report, and that has a couple of sections – the project information, and the energy consumption.
And of course, each year after that, you’ll do the same thing. Ideally you would keep this going. Why would you put all the effort into setting it up, and not continuing the effort – it should be saving you energy, saving you money. So, a year later, you go through the process again. And then the only difference is, you're going to submit an additional section on energy performance improvement.
I should mention that once you submit those forms to us, we’d review them and we’ll also send you an acknowledgement that we received it, and then our 50001 Ready Help Desk will contact you, to go over things – about a five to ten minute call as part of our quality controls, as well as just understanding the type of work that you're doing. So again, you log into the Navigator, set up your project and as you work through, you confirm your 25 tasks. If a project goes dormant for three years, we're just going to move all of the tasks back to “in progress” and you'll need to reaffirm the completion by changing the status of those. You have to go through each one. So, it obviously pays to keep up on this.
And here's the self-attestation form. It asserts your commitment to have completed the 25 Navigator tasks, and to your commitment to improving your energy management system over time. And it includes information on your project’s details. Of course, it gets an energy team lead signature and senior management representative, because as we all know, you know, for an energy management system, to be effective, it has to have buy-in from management. And that's why we're asking for that high-level signature. We want to make sure that you have buy-in at the highest level of your organization. So – and, of course, each year you resubmit that form.
The energy performance improvement report has three sections, and the first portion is probably not that complicated – the project information. But – you’ll probably want to go through each one of these in detail, but the second section will collect the energy consumption data. And then the third section, the energy performance improvement. There is also an energy conversion sheet that may be useful to you, depending how you fill your forms out, and the section three, of course, is only required if you're doing a re-attestation. I should also mention that filling out the energy data collection shouldn't really be too complicated, because Task Eight of the twenty-five tasks – the energy data collection and the analysis, is going to get you that information. So if you've already proceeded through your energy management system, putting in all those 25 steps, you'll have actually collected that information. And it should be fairly simple to do that. You also have the option of using the energy consumption tracker resource to identify that information.
So here we are – the instructions and energy conversion sheets. You know, just step-by-step instructions – we try and make this as straightforward and simple as possible, but if you have any questions, you can contact our Help Desk - that's what it’s there for. And then the energy conversion sheet – you put in your energy data, such as kilowatt-hours, or therms of natural gas, or gallons of gasoline or diesel, whatever it is, and it'll just automatically – you can do the conversion, because, you know, at the site level, you're looking at site energy, right? That's what you deal with day in and day out, but at the – at our level, we roll everything into MMBtu’s, and we also look at primary energy. We want to track everything back to the power plants, so that we have more global picture. We recognize that that's not as important at the site level, but from the standpoint of the overall program, that information is useful to us, as well as to policymakers.
So, again, very simple – put in the number of buildings at your site, the total square footage at your site, contact information, that type of stuff.
And you'll have a 12-month current reporting period. And you'll want to record when that starts – and we're looking at something – a 12-month period within the previous 25 months. And then as you move forward, you’ll have subsequent annual recognition information – you'll use the 12 months following that. And of course, you enter in the energy consumed in Btu’s, record all the different types of energy that you use. We're really interested in metrics representing more than 5% overall energy consumption. And so, you would enter that number into the white boxes, and then of course it will calculate over to the primary numbers in the gray boxes.
And so the 25 month period – so let's say January 1 was when you were starting your – you were asking for recognition.
Your current reporting period – that initial reporting period for your first time – can be anytime in the previous 25 months, which would anytime between December 1st, 2017 and January 1st of 2020. And in this example, we've chosen between December and January of 2019. And then, going forward, you've got the succeeding 12-month period that you can submit as your re-recognition.
You're going to record the method for determining your energy improvement report. You'll see in the orange circle there, there's several different ways we accept data. You can do energy intensity. You can also pull information from some other DOE and EPA programs, like the Better Plants program or the Better Buildings program. And then you would do your energy performance improvement value. And so, you can enter that in as a percentage, based on the method you use. If you have a negative number – and this happens from time to time – certainly a year like 2020 is a possibility. It's been a crazy year, so I expect it's going to produce some crazy numbers. And so – but we want to go ahead and get that in – record that information. That information is useful – it all rolls up into greater insights for everybody, really. So, we do want to get that information. So, go ahead and record that.
You can see that the current reporting period turns into the prior reporting period, and your new current reporting period is the following 12 months. Now, I recognize that that doesn't always happen exactly 12 months after – there could be a small gap in there, and that's fine. I mean, ideally you want it to be – you want to compare similar 12-month periods. That gives you, I would suggest, the best comparison and information, like during January to December, you want to do that year in, year out. But sometimes things happen and that's just not possible. And so, we make allowances for that. But if it gets to more than six months, do contact the 50001 Ready Help Desk, and have them help you work through that so that you can get the numbers right.
And then you're going to record that information, right? You're going to get your delta, and you'll put that in to the boxes over there on the right. Populate everything with your current information. You'll have the prior information in there. And of course, you'll be resubmitting this for your re-recognition of your 50001 Ready program – or, energy management system. In terms of energy intensity numbers, you’ll want to be consistent year in and year out. You know, if you're doing like, energy per ton of product or per square foot – whatever the – or number of occupants, whatever the energy intensity number you're using, you want to be consistent from year to year.
As I mentioned, we've designed this to accept data from a lot of other programs, such as the Department of Energy’s Better Plants program, the Better Buildings program, EPA Energy Star Portfolio Manager, and the Challenge for Industry. The Better Plants annual report allows for reporting intensity, and a regression-based energy performance improvement value. If you want to get more information about that, you can go to the Better Plants energy intensity baseline and tracking guidance document – that’ll give you the details on that. The Better Buildings challenge annual report – so if you're in the Better Buildings program, you’re going to be submitting an annual report, with data reported at the site level, rather than the corporate level, and the Better Buildings Challenge website has information on that. If you're using the Portfolio Manager - the 50001 Ready energy report for Portfolio Manager data request, it allows you – just follow the instructions for determining how to import that information, and get that performance improvement information into the Navigator. Energy Star energy performance indicator reports can be used with a portfolio manager or the EnPI Lite tool. So again, you have this nice capability to migrate information over.
Some utility programs out there are using M&V methodologies that are acceptable to us. Many of them are actually using, of course, the Ready Navigator. And if we can check with your program administrator and see if their program is associated with a 50001 Ready partner, and if their M&V process has been approved by DOE for use in the 50001 Ready program. So that is it – if anybody – Amy, do you think we should pause here and see if anybody has any questions, before we turn it over to Mike?
Amy Pevzner: Yeah, that's not a bad idea, since the information is fresh. If anyone would like to unmute themselves, they're able to do so, or you're welcome to type the message in the chat box. But basically, with these updates to the recognition, re-recognition process, the goal is just to make it as easy as possible for all of you to, submit your data and have your customers submit their data. And, do it in a very clean and easy way. What – you know, one of the things you might notice is, we've sort of moved away from using the terminology of baseline, since in many of your tracking reports baseline means one set date. With the reporting for 50001, we're focusing more on the current reporting period and the prior reporting period. And so hopefully that will make it simpler to provide the data needed and get your recognition in and hopefully build on that. Does anyone have any questions on the process at all?
Patrick Sippel: This is Patrick Sippel from CleaResult in Portland. Morning, all. Ethan, I may have missed this, but going back to the showing energy performance improvement on subsequent years. If you're tracking an SEU, as you are for 50001 Ready, 50001, and you're really honing in on that particular system/equipment/process, to reduce the energy use and you've got a dependable, reliable way of showing reduction in energy use for that system. Is that acceptable, even if the overall sites within the scope and boundaries if the site's energy use actually increases for whatever reason?
Ethan Rogers: Yeah, so, you know, with the standard, you know, the Ready program kind of follows the standard, and we're looking for that site information, everything that's in the scope and boundaries. And so, I recognize that you can have your most energy intensive process become more efficient, but the overall facility starts using more energy or something else happens that causes it maybe to be less efficient in terms of intensity or something like that. And that's going to happen, but we want to capture that information - both the information on the success you're having with your individual projects, but also the performance of the site.
Patrick Sippel: Perfect. That makes sense.
Ethan Rogers: We’ll say ideally we want to see energy performance improvement over time. A one-year bump is not to be unexpected, but you want to see consistent growth over time. And this is mirrored of course through the ISO standard, and also in our Superior Energy Performance program.
Patrick Sippel: Sure.
Ethan Rogers: It's a much more rigorous M&V.
Patrick Sippel: Yeah, absolutely. I just wanted to double-check, because organization’s will sometimes have, COVID notwithstanding, oddities where they take on more intense energy load for instance.
Ethan Rogers: Yeah.
Patrick Sippel: You know, they take on a more intense energy load for some reason, so ok.
Ethan Rogers: Mm-hmm.
Patrick Sippel: Cool.
Ethan Rogers: Sure. Yeah, non-routine events are always a challenge. I think the COVID pandemic is the ultimate non-routine event.
Patrick Sippel: Yeah, well and then here in Portland and along the whole West Coast, all the participants –
Ethan Rogers: You got fires, yeah.
Patrick Sippel: I'm working with – now you’ve got COVID to as much as possible, to fires, where – and it's just like, ok, why don’t we just all close our buildings the rest of this year and call 2020 over.
Ethan Rogers: Right. I'm waiting for the cicadas to come out of the ground and for us to have locusts here in Alexandria.
Patrick Sippel: Yeah, that’s – our joke here is – locusts and zombies are the next thing.
Amy Pevzner: We’re not far off. Yeah, so – and just to echo what Ethan said, we allow for two years of consecutive negative reporting to still keep compliant with 50001 Ready. Because, yeah – COVID and things happen and, processes change, and equipment –it all changes. So, there is that allowance. Are there any other questions?
Ethan Rogers: Well, thank you very much for this opportunity to share this with you. I'm going to turn it over to Mike Stowe, of Advanced Energy, and take it away.
Michael Stowe: Hello everyone. Thank you, Amy, and thank you, Ethan, for that very good information. Again, we're going to talk today a little bit about the 50001 Ready program and doing virtual cohorts, which we've done several of, both with federal agency groups, and local to North Carolina. Advanced Energy’s based in North Carolina.
So, these are kind of the things we're going to talk about – a little bit about our approach and engagement, the cohort method – 100% remote, as we've had to do this year. We have kind of a step 1-2-3 for the way we present and teach 50001 Ready. We're going to talk about some recent work we've done with the Federal Energy Management FEMP work and some NC cohorts, North Carolina local cohorts, where we have some interesting and unique funding, and then talk about some lessons learned.
So Advanced Energy in the early 2010’s decided that we thought 50001 had a great future. We knew that Ethan Rogers was eventually going to be at DOE, so that really locked us in for sure. So, we did make the effort to get some certifications to get some qualified instructors under the DOE program, working with Superior Energy Performance. And you can see some of the things we're engaged with – we're pretty much, you know, wherever ISO is happening, ISO 50001 credentials and so forth. We do a lot of stuff and Advanced Energy kind of made that commitment early on, and we continue to do that.
One of the things we wanted to do - LBNL offers a co-branding for the 50001 Ready tool, so we kind of helped pioneer that with LBNL, and we have our own, you know, 50001 Ready co-branded tool – if we form a cohort, we can use this. And actually, one of the things we have yet to do – and was recently talking to Amy about this – was to add tips. You can add – there's a way to add tips to each task. And we are thinking about adding some Advanced Energy tips based on lessons learned, and we've also been working with Fort Bragg and the Army, and we may hope to develop some Army-specific tips. So, the 50001 Ready tool is very, very useful, and you can customize it somewhat by branding it and co-branding with DOE on that.
So, the cohort method, 100% remote – typically the cohorts we have worked with has been five to seven companies. We have gone bigger, not really much smaller. Sometimes there's an issue about, you know, well I make rubber bands and so do you, so I don't want to tell you my stories. But not much, but you do have to kind of be aware of the competition between companies. Most people are very willing to share, very open to share their information, but you know, you do talk about your energy consumption and your processes, and there's just a little bit of something to be aware of as you form your cohort. You may not want York, Trane, and Carrier all in the same cohort, but it may be okay – it just depends.
One of the things – we'll talk about this several times – strong management commitment is essential. Ethan mentioned that – it’s so true. We've actually been working with clients where we had a very enthusiastic plant manager at one site, and we're moving down the road, and then come to find out, corporate got wind of what he was doing and said, no, no, no, we don't really want to do that. So corporate high-level, top-level – however you want to word it – they need to understand the requirements, that it’s not just a project, it’s not just a flavor of the month – it’s a long-term commitment.
And also, for remote success, we found that you really need a little bit more self-motivation from the attendees. There are some things that they’re just going to have to motivate themselves to do, because you're not going to be there, looking over their shoulder, or seeing them face to face periodically.
Teaching 50001 Ready remotely – we basically have this five or three big bullets and three little bullets process. Basically, we have an intro, where are we, where have we been, review the tasks we've done, see what's coming next, and then we do task – we'll do four or five, three, four, five tasks grouped together – sometimes chronologically, sometimes not, depends on the cohort’s needs and desires, and what we're trying to get to. But, generally in chronological order of the 25 tasks. Basically, the three things we do is PowerPoint slides, the 50001 Ready Navigator itself, and teach the Playbook. The Playbooks from 50001 Ready Navigator are extremely valuable. Some of the most frequent questions we get are, “Yeah, I got this Playbook, but what do I really need to put in this blank?” So, we've worked very hard at developing example Playbooks and working with people on Playbooks because they're very useful - they really cover what needs to be done. I've talked to people and said, you know, if you do the Playbook and do some due diligence on the Playbook, you really can feel good about self-attesting to having completed that task. You really can. The Playbooks are very thorough – maybe too thorough. And we'll talk a lot more about them, but – PowerPoint slides for general background information, go into the Navigator and look at the tabs of the specific task we're teaching, and then teach the Playbook. And then we always have a wrap up, and next steps section.
We'll go into these in a little more detail, these steps of how we've been doing the remote training. This is a slide we have in every – in the beginning of every session. This is the 25 tasks of the 50001 Navigator. The new Nav 3.0 version that's based on ISO 50001 2018, which just recently came out. So, this is all updated. The Navigator matches completely with the new version of the 50001 standard. And that's the one we currently teach to. And there are seven sections. Those are the seven headers. We always have the little Plan, Do, Check, Act icon down here at the bottom, and try to point out, you know what sessions are we going to do today. So, we show, okay, today we're going to do Task Eight and Nine. They're part of the planning section, and basically if you go across the top, it's plan, support and operations, or do, performance evaluation check, and improvement acts. So, we relate it to the plan, do, check, act model.
The first slide for every task, we have a direct quote from the Navigator. This is exactly what the Navigator says. We'll start out with this. The notes for this slide, when we had this slide on a PowerPoint, the actual notes that I can see, are the getting it done section of the 50001 Navigator. And if you're from North Carolina, you say, get ‘er done instead of getting it done, but that's very good, is that the navigator is very good in the sense that it has that getting it done section right on the first tab for every task, and it really boils it down in non-standard language. Standard language is kind of a jargon. There are some things in your standards is, you shall do blah, blah, blah. “What does that mean I really have to do?” The Navigator really does a great job in the first tab of getting it done. “What do you really need to do?” We determine our significant energy users, blah, blah, blah. “Well, what do you have to do to do that?” Well, it tells you. It's very good, and we point that out. Getting it done is very good information for someone that doesn't necessarily read standard language, but wants to know what they do – need to do to meet the requirement.
This is a typical slide we would show for Task Nine. You determine your significant energy users in Task Nine. Significance is determined by your organization, we make that point, we show a slide, what do you think would be significant on this slide? Well, it's probably the blue Pac-man – that's 80% of our energy use, and things like that. And then we point out, you know, SEU’s can be facilities, systems, processes, or equipment. So, we have a couple of PowerPoint slides with some background information to put the requirements into perspective.
So, we use these to help people understand what the background is, what is the purpose of this specific task, and how it may relate to the 50001 standard. So, we have a few PowerPoint slides.
After we go through our PowerPoint slides, we have this slide at the end of every task and we do it as an activity. When we do this in person, we would actually hand out blank Playbooks. We’d assign work and people groups, in working groups, and then we’d walk around the room as people worked on their task Playbook. So, this is an activity, the first thing we do is we go and look at Task Nine and 50001 Ready. And so, we'd click on that. We'd see the tabs we explain getting it done, task overview, full description, where can you add notes, where can you update your task status from not started to in progress – we look at all the functionality.
We point out the great button for the Help Desk you can click on and email the Help Desk, and they're very good to respond to you, and just go through the features of the Navigator for that task. Spend a few minutes in there, and then we'll actually pull up the Playbook and the Playbooks are very good – again, in this top blue section – and I just got kind of the top piece here, of an example of a Playbook for Task Nine, but again this closely matches, you know, getting it done. What do you need to do? This part of the Navigator is completed when you have 1, 2, 3, 4 – people love that, they love having that information to know - “what do I do?”
The standard says you shall do this, and you shall do that, but it's not big on how you do it. These help you understand, what you need to do and how you do it. And so, it tells you – you know, identify the energy uses that consume the most energy within your scope and boundaries, and being on Task Nine, they will understand what boundaries are, because you already did Task Three earlier, and so forth. Who are the people that need to understand SEU’s and did you tell them, and things like that, so in using the Playbooks – we actually spend – probably proportionally, we probably spend a third, and – maybe a third and then maybe three-fifths on the Playbook. We really teach the Playbook because that's where you really can get things done.
When we do enter the Navigator, we – this is actually the Navigator cut sheet from Task Nine. You can see this statement here. We determine our significant energy users – that's exactly what's on our introductory slide for every task that we teach. Getting it done – down at the bottom of the slide is the really good stuff about what you really got to do. And then of course, there's all the other tabs. The Help Desk is great. You can see this was our North Carolina cohort that we co-branded, so in the Help Desk there's a North Carolina Ready cohort help button, which would email me and then there's the regular 50001 Ready Help Desk, which I think would email Amy or Vestal Tutterow, or somebody at LBNL. So, we open up the task, we show the features, we look at the getting it done section in detail.
And then we go into the Playbook. And again, we open the actual Playbook that's associated with the task at hand. We go through the examples. This one's filled out in red. We we've tried to fill them out to have examples. That’s a work in progress, we're refining and we're going to work on a set of specific Playbooks that are filled out to be examples for Army bases because we're working with Fort Bragg, but they want to – and that’s the first one that's done it, and we're going to cross-pollinate that across numerous Army bases. So, we want to develop an “Army” set of Playbooks for them to use. And again, one thing to remember – and I know that LBNL did this on purpose – 50001 Ready playbooks are not PDF’s – they’re Microsoft Word. So, you can manipulate them, change them, edit them, add a column, add a comment, delete something – You can tailor them to suit your site and your needs and that's great. And that's what we encourage people to do.
And then typically after we've done that, we may do, like I said, four, five, six, eight tasks. Typically, if they're hard, like SEU’s and data collection, we might do Eight and Nine together. If they're a little more system oriented or basic, we may do Six. And they're kind of grouped together in logical groups.
So, this is what we did today. And this is what we're going to do next session, which is on October 21st or whatever. So, we review what we did. And this is what we're going to do next.
Then we always have our homework slide, which is everyone's favorite. These are things to work on. We always encourage people to purchase and download the standard, of course, set up your Ready account – that's kind of necessary if you're going to really participate. And then, you know, in this case, in the example I'm using with being on Task Nine, we would have, you know, please download Playbooks One through Nine. And it – like the previous session may have said download One through Six or something, and begin working on these. We talk about office hours – I'll talk about that in just a few minutes. And then prepare for the next webinar, so please review Task 10 through 13 in Ready, download the Playbooks, and then just some questions to think about – what are your site energy goals and objectives – Task 12, have you picked any energy performance indicators, what might you use as Task 11? Do you have action plans for improving or implementing – you know, just some questions, some thought questions for them to think about for the next session.
So just to review, the three steps we really teach to, is we have PowerPoint slides that have a background of the task. It has the task stated, we talk about getting it done. We look at some background information and examples of what it might be talking about, and how to get where you need to get. We go into the Navigator itself, and look at the task wording, the tabs, the functionality, the various things you can use to help show people, remind people, where you can download the resources, if they haven't yet. And then we show an example Playbook, and really go through the Playbook in in some detail, depending on which one it is. And those three steps seem to work very well with a remote group.
So, talk about some of the recent work we've done, one of the things we've done recently is – Fort Bragg is not a cohort, but it's like – it's a city, it's – there’s 60,000 plus or minus soldiers there, another hundred some thousand civilian and contract employees. There are 5000-plus buildings around 53 million square feet of heated and cooled spaces, office – from office buildings to simulators, to all kinds of stuff. They have a lot of central heating and cooling plants, where they'll have a big plant that might have 20 or 30 buildings attached to it, where they provide hot water for heating and showers and restrooms and so forth, and cooking, and also cooling. So that's not really a cohort, but we're working on 50001 Ready with Fort Bragg, and that's the Army's pilot site, and the Army wants to spread this – they have another site started, and they want to spread this to other Army bases. 50001 Ready is – the Army likes it, they want to do it, and they're going to do it, and they're starting with Fort Bragg.
Earlier this year, we worked on two cohorts, all 100% remote. Fort Bragg was initially, because since it’s right down the road in Fayetteville, North Carolina, from Raleigh, we did do some face to face. Since February, we've gone to doing remote with them, with training and interchanging tasks, and helping them with their task development for the 50001 Ready Playbooks.
NASA cohort and DOJ cohort, we're 100% remote, and that was the intention to start with. So, there wasn't any trips that were canceled, it was going to be remote and it was remote. The NASA cohort had 14 sites, most of them, you probably heard of – Kennedy Space Center, Johnson Space Center, you know, all the testing facilities and labs that they have, plus their headquarters. We had the DOJ cohort, which was five sites. Two FBI – one was Quantico that everybody knows about. Three ATF sites, so Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, plus their headquarters. And those went very well – they were all remote. They were seven sessions each. Two different approaches – the DOJ Cohort wanted the training fast, so we did the six or seven sessions in about six – about eight weeks.
NASA wanted to move more gradually, and we did a session per month, over about six or seven months, and then we would have – with NASA, we actually had what we called office hours in between. Which was just a, kind of a – you know, we would get on the call with the NASA headquarters energy manager, and I'd be on the call and LBNL would be on the call. And people could just call in with a question, or call in and share a Playbook. And we’d go through it. So, it was like when a professor has office hours at college, and you can go ask questions about the homework. So those were really good. They're complete now, and DOJ and NASA teams are on their own from our training, and working toward 50001 Ready and hopefully recognition.
In North Carolina, earlier this year we established the North Carolina cohort. In North Carolina – Advanced Energy is a nonprofit energy consulting firm, and we are funded in North Carolina by the ratepayers of North Carolina. It’s called member funding, and Duke Energy, the North Carolina co-ops, Dominion Power out of Virginia, which is – serves part of northeastern North Carolina – they all participate, and basically rate pay – a portion of their ratepayer funding goes into a fund, and we cooperate with Duke energy and the co-ops and so forth, to establish projects. And one of our projects is industrial and commercial energy assessments, strategic energy management, and this year we had funding to do a North Carolina cohort from Duke Energy. And for anybody – you didn't have to be a Duke Energy customer, they just wanted to support us doing a cohort.
So anyway, we recruited and marketed, and there were 16 organizations. Two of them had two sites, so that made 18 different distinct sites across North Carolina. Very diverse – in terms of being a cohort, they were not necessarily a cohort in terms of background, they were very diverse – non-industrial, some colleges, some government. And one utility, which was a water and wastewater treatment plant down near Wilmington, North Carolina. We're on session – we finished like through session five of eight sessions. This was coordinated as an eight-session group, and we have office hours in between. So, we have one session a month with office hours in between at the two-week point, and we're following the very similar three-step process I talked about earlier.
And It's been a very good group. And it's interesting the range of the cohort – there's some here that are going to get certified in ISO 50001, there's some that want to get Ready recognized, and there's some that are just curious. So, it's a wide range of interest in levels of commitment and plans for the future.
And the other one we've been working with is like a cohort, but it's one company. Daimler Truck in North Carolina. They have five sites in North Carolina, one in South Carolina, one in Portland, Oregon, and two in Mexico. That's the eight manufacturing sites, and then two headquarters – one in North Carolina, one in Portland. They manufacture the big beautiful freightliner tractors that you see out on the road. I love their tractor-trailer – their tractors are just absolutely beautiful trucks. So that's been quite interesting. And they are going – they are going to get certified. They want to get certified in ISO – multi-site for all 10 sites.
So that's some of the work we've been doing in 2020, and some of it will carry over into – Daimler will carry over into 2021. We hope to have another NC cohort in 2021, and probably will do some more federal work in 2021.
So, some of the lessons learned over the years – 50001 Ready and ISO standards, all of them, are continual improvement. So, one of the things we encourage people is, you don't have to be perfect immediately. We would present a Playbook or a task or something that people say, oh my gosh, I'm never going to be able to do that. That's okay. You don't have to do it all today. You don't have to be perfect – leave some room for you to do the Plan, Do, Check, Act and improve, you know – so don't let perfect getting the way of ok. Progress – you know, when you've done your due diligence and you're moving forward, self-attest, it's ok. You don't have to be perfect right out of the gate.
Teach to the Navigator and its Playbooks – you know, you don't have to spend hours with PowerPoint slide decks, explaining background stuff. A few are good, but what we have come to learn, and the questions we get back from people, and the feedback we've seen is, what do I have to do to complete this task? Tell me what I have to do to complete this task, so I can say, I've completed this task. I can go in the Navigator and check it and it'll show my little circle that I'm making some progress on my dashboard.
And you can use the getting it done in the in the Playbook, and having a set of relevant and applicable Playbooks to the audience – you know, if it's industrial they may have a different slant than if it's a bunch of colleges and universities, or a military base. You know, certainly the playbooks we're doing – I mean, I think our playbook for legal and other requirements ended up being about four pages long, because there's just so many things an Army base has to do, per the federal government regulations. Procurement on an Army base is a whole different nightmare.
So, having a good set of Playbooks is crucial – is what we feel people need. If you teach the Navigator, the navigator has the Playbooks – you want to teach to the Playbooks, and teach people how to fill those out. And having an example that they can relate to is great. Having a blank one –the first question, they're going to do is, okay, I understand this, but what does it really mean – what should I really put in there? So, teaching to an example is great.
Leverage existing management systems. So many of the people we work through don't take full advantage of the fact that they're ISO 14001 certified. That's the most common – there's literally hundreds of thousands of sites that have ISO 14001, that may want to work on 50001. So many of the system, the management system things – like having a policy, understanding your scope and boundaries, legal and other requirements, making people aware, training, competence of people, you know, document control, internal audit, management review – all those things are common across ISO 14001, 9001– those are all common. So, if you got 14001, you don’t have to have an internal audit system just for 50001. If you're doing 14001, you've got an internal audit system, because you have to, you know. So, use the things – you got a document control system if you got any ISO, or probably even if you don't, you probably have some way of controlling your company's documents. So, leverage all those things. There's no need to reinvent the wheel, and that – you know, looking at the Playbooks with people, like in NASA and DOJ, they said, well we have a system that does this, do I really need to use the Playbook? And the answer may be no, or you can modify the Playbook to match, or you can document in the Playbook what you're already doing. You don't necessarily need to reinvent something.
The playbooks are in Microsoft Word for a reason – you can tailor these to your site, if you want to, you can add things, you can use them for documentation. You know, if you fill out the playbook saying, this is what we did – that documents your process. So use them and change them – if you want to add a column to a template, or add something that you want, or take something out, that's ok.
Pick your SEU’s wisely. We – if I say this once, I say it 1000 times in the course of a network – a cohort. You don't want to start, you know, going crazy. So, there's 11 things that you have to do downstream, if you pick an SEU, and I go over those in detail with people when we teach the cohort. So, if you pick seven SEU’s, then you have 77 things to do downstream. If you pick two, you have 22 things to do. So, there's a huge difference. So, start small – you don't have to be perfect, pick a couple SEU’s, beat them down, and then regroup – do another energy review, and pick your next ones and beat them down.
A couple other things we did in our cohorts – virtual hosting. We – since we were all virtual, and we couldn't see each other and, you know, go have a beer, drink coffee, or go to lunch, we had a virtual host for each session – or tried to – and what that was, the virtual host would be, say, NASA Kennedy Space Center is our virtual host for the day. So, they would have like five to 10 minutes of the webinar, and they would present about Kennedy Space Center. And for me, and even the other NASA sites, it was so interesting to hear about all the stuff they do, especially some of the ATF sites where they train – canine training and some of the stuff they do, and we did the same thing with the North Carolina cohort. So, it's interesting for an industrial guy to get a college perspective, or a college campus to get an industrial perspective.
Office hours – I mentioned that. We had office hours with NASA, we had office hours with our NC cohort. We have office hours with Daimler. So that's kind of good – it's a little less formal than the presentation or the webinar sessions. People can call in, get their answers and leave. They – it's just a drop-in and we have virtual donuts and coffee.
Playbook exchange – you know, people, especially like NASA, they have a lot of the same requirements from NASA headquarters. So, if one site has got a good Playbook, we would say, well, let's share that Playbook with the other sites. That's really good – you did a great job on this and they – you know, they’d always get permission, and you got – again, you kind of have to be careful about changing – exchanging Playbooks, with privacy and data and so forth. But it is a good thing to do if you have – like Daimler, they're all the same company. Or NASA is all the same entity. So, it's a – ok, next, please.
We did a survey, four out of five energy consultants surveyed recommend 50001 Ready. To prevent your energy team from going crazy. There was no actually survey taken, we just did this to make a point. But yeah, it's really good. I'm a believer, as you can probably tell. 50001 Ready is great. Lots of good things. Yeah, I think that's it. Happy to answer any questions if we have time thanks.
Amy Pevzner: Yes, thank you so much, Michael. Yeah, I will open the floor here to questions – feel free to chat, or you are all unmuted. So, if you'd like to just ask, ask away. Let’s see a huge takeaway here is, especially in COVID, the lesson here is yes, we can continue the training, and do it all remotely. And hopefully will continue to keep the cohorts involved and excited.
Ethan Rogers: Yeah. This is Ethan – I just want to thank Mike for sharing the process that he's used to offer this training virtually. We knew early this year when we were switching over to doing virtual webinars and things like that, the question a lot of people had was, you know, how limiting is this going to be with regard to helping organizations implement energy management systems. And you never know until you try, right? And so credit to Michael and the rest of his team, for finding a way to reach out to the government agencies and other organizations, and help them with their energy management journey.
Michael Stowe: Yeah thanks – thanks Ethan. And I was a little skeptical about doing a whole session remotely, especially with some of the, you know, energy management, energy measurement and linear regression, and some of those things, and doing activities, but it actually worked out ok. You can do an activity remotely, and you can – the office hours really were good too, so, thanks.
Ethan Rogers: Yeah, that's a nice feature. And we – just working – working with government agencies can be tricky. And so – but the nice feature there is since most people, even in good times, would have trouble traveling to this type of training, it has proven to be a very nice option.
We certainly appreciate all of our utility partners and encourage more of you to embrace the program and the Navigator platform. We’re glad it’s working for you. Do let us know what other things you’d like us to cover. With that we’ll let you go—and thank you Amy for running the show today. We’ll wrap it, thank you everyone. Have a wonderful afternoon and rest of your week!
END OF WEBINAR