The U.S. Department of Energy hosted the webinar, 50001 Ready Partner Program Overview, in May 2019. DOE demonstrated new capabilities in the 50001 Ready Navigator tool for utilities and partners to manage cohorts of customers that are implementing energy management systems. Utilities can add their branding and add tailored content to better connect Navigator activities with their specific SEM or custom programs. DOE also introduced the 50001 Ready Playbook, another resource that offers a repository to organize, save, and track completed forms and actions related to Navigator tasks. View the recording and slides.
This webinar is part of DOE’s 50001 Ready Utility Network Series, a forum for utilities, public benefit administrators (PBA), third party implementers, consultants, and regulators who share an interest in energy management systems (EnMS) including ISO 50001 and DOE’s 50001 Ready program. Through these webinars, stakeholders can learn about DOE energy management resources and provide input.
Learn more:
- Learn more about 50001 Ready for utilities, implementers, and energy service providers
- View other 50001 Ready Utility Network Series webinars and register for future events
- Try out the 50001 Ready Navigator
Transcription
Peter Therkelsen: Welcome to the seventh 50001 Ready Utility Network Series in May of this year. We are extremely excited about this webinar, as we are publicly launching our partner platform functionality, capabilities, partnerships with U.S.-based organizations, for them to support, observe, and have additional guidance of partners of their own, as they go through 50001 Ready Navigator. This functionality was developed in collaboration with a number of utility and utility implementers, and other consultants, as a way for them to adapt the Navigator to their own business needs, to enable them to provide better offerings to their customers, within the discretion of those companies’ interests. So this is not a new program for you to take and run wholesale, but a flexibility of the Navigator for you to use to adapt to your own interests.
Very quickly, I should have introduced myself earlier. This is Peter Therkelsen with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Sandy Glatt with the United States Department of Energy will provide an introduction and closing today. Quickly, before Sandy gives her welcome, some logistics – you are on mute by default, you’ve probably discovered. Please feel free to use the chat box to ask questions at any time – we’ve got a number of people watching them for questions. We will take some quick breaks in between natural pause points, to see questions for the chat box. This session is being recorded, and will be transcribed and posted online. Slides, as well as that recording and transcription will be available on energy.gov/50001Ready. The slides are posted very quickly; the recording takes a little bit more time.
Zoom – the web sharing feature we’re using – typically forces you into a full-screen mode. Go ahead and double-click or press Escape to exit if you need to get to a different application. And you should be able to find a control bar at the top or bottom or side of your screen.
Sandy, would you like to welcome everyone to the webinar today?
Sandy Glatt: Yeah, sure. Welcome – glad everyone could make it, and just a few background remarks as well before we get officially started. So, the ability to co-brand the Navigator was something that we had envisioned from very early on when we were developing, particularly as it pertained to utility-type programs, so that this resource / offering could be embedded into whatever your particular program that you’re delivering to your customers is called, and sort of remove DOE from the face of 50001 Ready in the Navigator. It took us a lot longer to get to where to we are today than we had originally anticipated, for a variety of reasons – some of it is just getting folks using it and getting a better understanding of what people really were interested in and wanted. We did run into some internal federal government copyright kinds of issues, as well as some other challenges that we have to address as a public entity that provides our services free of service to the taxpayers.
As we – after we go through this, one of the things is that – being a partner – and Peter will explain all of this in much better detail – will require an agreement form, going through a couple of steps, and it does have some legalese in it, but I just want to sort of ease everyone’s potential concern, because it really has to do with two things. One of them is making sure that the rights of the Department of Energy are maintained, and that’s sort of the copyright issue, and the other part of it is, as I mentioned just previously, avoiding the monetization of free resources provided by DOE. We do not want to, and cannot and have no intention of controlling kind of technical assistance and resources that you provide, but it’s very important that the resources that we provide free of charge – and that’s not going to go away – are not as per se kind of monetized – you know, can’t charge people for the use of the Navigator.
And so that’s what’s behind the agreement form that Peter will introduce later in the presentation. The other thing is, just so folks know – many of you or several of you potentially participated or have been introduced to our multi-site functionality, which still exists. When we did launch that, and when we did do presentations on that, we tried to make it clear to folks that the intended audience for that was generally a large, probably industrial facility, or maybe a set of hotels, or something like that, where you had a single central office, and then several facilities that were all part of the same organization or entity. A lot of that functionality has been rolled over, but we quickly learned that that functionality did not really address all of the needs of what you would have in more of a traditional either energy service provider context, or a utility SEM program – utility program or an SEM cohort. So that’s what this partnership platform is trying to address.
And then we’ll finish today with a couple other things that we’ve been working on that I think most of you will find hopefully exciting and encouraging. With that, I will pass it back over to Peter.
Peter: Thanks Sandy. As Sandy said, we are very excited about this functionality, and hope that it does enable all of you to make better use and be the face of 50001 Ready in a way that supports your own businesses and your own programs.
Let’s see – there we go. Our agenda today – introduce the partner platform functionality that we’ve been describing, that this is for utilities, implementers, and business-to-business energy service providers, to co-brand the Navigator and DOE recognition, provide custom guidance and track progress, to discuss as Sandy mentioned, the relationship between the multi-site and partner platform functionalities, that these two features work together and do not conflict, which should be an added value to your customers. We’re going to do a walk-through of the functionality – the new functionality, and then have a really quick little mini-demo of it and take questions about it live.
And the bottom line on both the walk-through and the demo is that the 50001 Ready help desk staff are here to help you answer any questions, talk through how this might work for your organization, how you might set it up, how you might add value to your customers and your offerings. And then Sandy will provide some other updates around 50001 Ready in DOE world.
So what is, why is the partner platform? As Sandy mentioned, DOE is looking to enable other organizations to be the face and carry forward the technical content and concept that is embodied in the 50001 Ready Navigator. This is not, again, to be a wholesale program offering, but is meant to be resources that other organizations can make use of in their current or new activities, and since it is their activities, put their branding on it, their spin on it, in partnership with the Department of Energy basic resources.
So, to do this, DOE’s going to look to support engagement with these other organizations by entering into a partnership. And this partnership has some constructs around it, around use – but the real big difference that this allows you is that it allows you to use the 50001 Ready logo, to have your logo appear on a branded version of the online 50001 Ready Navigator, for you to provide custom guidance, and for your logo and branding to appear on the DOE recognition that is issued to facilities that successfully complete the Navigator and Ready program.
The partners may include the assets in for-profit services, as long as there are certain disclaimers about the origin and availability of free services from DOE. As Sandy mentioned, this is a public purpose program that is available to all, but we want to enable the private sector to make use of this in their own business ventures moving forward.
So what can you do with the partner platform? We kind of alluded to some of these capabilities, but probably the biggest and most interesting functionality for the utility and implementer community is the idea that you, as the utility or implementer, can organize multiple facilities – customers – into cohorts. So you can start to group these individual projects that have been created in the Navigator, that you don’t really have a way of getting en masse insights of, together. Right now, if you wanted to see the progress of any one project, you would need the people at that facility who own that project to add you as a member, essentially of that energy team. Which is a fine functionality, and works still the same, but if you wanted to see a grouping of any number of facilities together all at once and get a quick snapshot of progress, or who’s engaged, you can do that now with this functionality.
It also allows you to give access of any individual, from any different organization, the ability to have insights to track that progress. So if you’re a utility, you can enable your implementers to essentially, under your utility partnership with DOE, to view all cohorts or certain cohorts. Or if you’re an implementer with a partnership and you are managing a cohort, you can allow your utility sponsor access to see certain cohorts within – under your partnership.
The platform is meant to be highly flexible, to accommodate any relationship between utility implementer or private energy service provider. Second big thing I mentioned – the use of the 50001 Ready logo. So you can slap this logo that hopefully has some brand value now, on your website, on your materials, and really advertise that you are partnering with the Department of Energy to bring these technical resources to your customers. Third – your logo can appear now on the Navigator itself, as well as the recognitions provided to facilities who complete the 50001 Ready program through your Navigator partnership.
So it’s not that everyone will see your logo on the Navigator at all times, it’s that if people log into the Navigator and have associated their specific projects with your partnership, they will see your logo and then if they complete the Ready Program through your partnership, they will have – you will have the option of including your logo on the certificate.
And fourth, you can now provide custom guidance for each task within the Navigator, and we’ll get into a little more details about this later, but this allows you to essentially add on, augment what is the stock Navigator text with additionalities that could be specific to any one, say, SEM program about how to calculate energy savings. It could be specific about bringing materials to a certain workshop, or provide other insights and tips that you have that you would want to pass on to projects that are part of your partnership.
So, who can be a partner? Basically everyone, as long as you’re in the United States. It’s a pretty low bar. You do have to agree to some partnership legalese, basically saying that you’re not going to abuse the IP, and you’re not going to do this that and the other thing, and you’re not going to represent that you are DOE, and all that kind of legalese mumbo jumbo. But, that’s about it. If you’re a U.S.-based organization, you can be an official partner with Department of Energy, and the 50001 Ready Navigator. If you’re not in the United States, that’s fine, you still can use all the other existing functionality of the Navigator as it is, you can still use multi-site, but really it comes down to the ability to co-brand, especially on the recognition and on the Navigator itself.
So, after all that – a little quiz to make sure everyone’s paying attention. Who should be the partner in the utility-implementer relationship? We have a utility, ABC utility; they have got an SEM program – they want to use Ready. They’ve got an awesome SEM program and they’re looking to increase some of their documentation and take some of their customers to the next level. This utility has two cohorts – one run by implementer A, one run by implementer B. And they don’t particularly want both implementers to see all the details of each other’s cohorts. Well, implementer A is already a 50001 Ready partner with DOE, supporting some other utilities and direct business-to-business services. Implementer B is not a 50001 Ready partner right now.
So, how do they set this up? Who’s the partner? Are they all the partner? Should the utility be the partner? Does implementer A have to give up their partnership with DOE to work under the utility’s new partnership? And more importantly, why isn’t implementer B a partner already? What are they doing over there? And the answer is that the partner platform allows any of these organizations to be a partner, and that the customization of providing different administrative rights and insights to different individual users and the co-branding allows any relationship between the utility implementer being a partner to work. And we are here to help you understand how these can be set up, the complexities of it, or the simplicity of it, and get you going in these relationships.
We’ve mentioned multi-site a few times, and for those of you that are familiar with this functionality, it was a development that was focused primarily at corporations with multiple facilities that want to internalize their energy – portions of their energy management system at a central office functionality. And they have the ability to have insights inside their company, and to have a little bit more command control in terms of pushing down or approving the completion of Navigator tasks.
You can think about a central office that has a – a company that has an energy policy that would cover its entire – all of its facilities. This allows that company to tell all those facilities associated with this multi-site functionality that task – energy policy task is completed already, here is the policy, you don’t need to go make up one on your own.
Well, does that conflict with the partnership – the partner platform? Does it – should it get replaced by the partner platform? And the answer is no, that the multi-site again is focused on kind of a command-control of multiple projects for one related energy management system, and the partner platform is about supporting and observing and reporting of projects that are – do not have one related energy management system.
And so these two can work together – so individual projects that are part of a corporate multi-site can absolutely join another partner platform. And so a company that’s working with its corporate office can join your SEM cohort, and all of the benefits of both functionalities can be instilled in that project still.
I want to pause right here and see if there’s any questions from the audience right now. We’ve kind of gone quickly over the basic premise of this partner platform, that this is about supporting, observing, and reporting on projects, organizing them into kind of cohort structure, and having any number of configurations to allow utility, implementer, and business-to-business energy service provider have insights into the progress of certain projects – Navigator projects that have joined those partnerships.
And feel free to use the chat box to submit any questions. And while people are thinking of questions, we’ll start to talk through the walk-through of this functionality, and start to see, how do you sign up to be a partner, and then what happens when you are a partner, and what does your insights of the Navigator start to look like. So we’ll go through the partner dashboard, tips and customization, cohorts –the partner dashboard and cohort administrator privileges, and then this concept of reference codes and referral links – how do you get projects, and how do you get your customers to participate under your partnership?
So first things first, you have to be a partner to have this functionality. So, the quick and easy way to become a partner is to go to 50001 – sorry, www.energy.gov/50001Ready, and that will redirect you to a really long URL for the Better Buildings Solution Center 50001 page. If you scroll down a little bit, you’ll see six little tiles – one of them is called 50001 Ready for Program Administrators and Implementers. You click on that one, and then you come to the page that you’re seeing on the screen now. And scroll down just a touch – right at the top, we have a section about DOE’s 50001 Ready partner program.
It gives a brief description of kind of the materials we’re going over now. There’s a couple links to a document called a Partnership Charter, that goes over a little more detail how the partnership works in detail. And then you can see the big Sign Up Today button down at the bottom. That shoots you over to the Navigator itself, and you’ll need to be logged in to get to this enrollment form. You fill out your details here, click Submit, and then those of us at the 50001 Ready help desk get a notification, and then we set up a call with you to talk through how you want to set this up, and what services we can provide to you to make sure that you’re successful in using this partner platform.
So again, low bar to entry – be a U.S.-based company, have a Navigator account, get to the enrollment form, fill it out, and you’re on your way.
So after you’ve enrolled, after you’ve become a partner, you now have access to create a partner dashboard. We made up a mock dashboard for a partner named ABC Utility – you can see they’ve got a little lightning bolt logo for a utility that they’ve put on here. There’s a top banner that indicates that this is your partnership dashboard, there’s some basic information about who is the point of contact for this partnership, and administrative controls. You can then kind of see as we go down this page, there’s tips that can be updated that I mentioned before – general tips, and then we’ll get specific later about cohort tips. You can see the total connected number of projects, and what’s going on. You can see different cohorts that have been set up under this partnership, and there’s details within that. And then you can see below any project that is associated with this partnership, which cohort it is connected to, and its progress as they move through.
So this dashboard shows you your contact and administrative needs, it shows you the cohorts you have set up, and it shows you all the details about each project that’s associated with your partnership. And you’ll note that up at the top, there’s Manage Associated Users – we’ll get into detail later about what that looks like, but we’ll see that you can manage the administrative rights for people to see this partner level, or just individual cohort level information. You’ll see this little settings gear icon next to each cohort – that allows you to go in and customize the main point of contact for that cohort, and an individual if you want for that cohort, so that logo that’s provided for the partner dashboard by default is associated with each cohort, but each cohort can be customized with its own information. And you can see that you can change and move different projects into different cohorts, once they have agreed to join your partnership.
Partner contact details – at the highest level of the partnership, you can name your partnership, you can create an overall reference code for projects to join your partnership, you can provide public contact information – this is the information that people who have joined as projects of your partnership will see if they have questions or need to contact you – and then you can upload your customized logo.
You can also provide different levels of administrative rights to individuals for your partnership. Here you can see for ABC Utility, myself, Sandy, Aimee, and Mike are all added to this partnership, but with different levels of access. So myself and Sandy have full administrator access and can see everything about this partnership, whereas Aimee and Mike – they’ve been restricted down to just see details about individual cohorts. Aimee can see – has full access of ABC Cohort 2019, while Mike only can see details about the Pilot Program Cohort.
When you click Update Access Levels for each individual, you can see that you can grant full administrator access for everything on the partnership, or again, limit based upon each cohort, whether they have full, or read, or no access to that cohort. So if you’re a utility, you can bring on implementers and allow them only to see specific cohorts. If you’re an implementer, you can do the other way around, and bring on utility staff so they can see only information about the cohort related to that utility.
Tips – one of the biggest features we’ve been asked to include is customizable tips. This doesn’t allow you to change the base content of the Navigator. That language is all the same. But what you’re able to do is have another textbox that provides your additional guidance or information. And you can set these tips both at the general partner level, or a specific cohort level. If you create a general partner tip, it pushes down to all projects, regardless of whether they’re in a cohort or not. So in this case, we have two tips – one for Task 1, one for Task 2, and these will push down to all projects.
But, in the ABC Cohort 2019, we have customized some of the tips. And you can see that it shows you what the users in that cohort will see. So for Task 1, it says “currently providing this general partner tip,” Because we haven’t provided a cohort-specific tip for Task 1. However, for Task 2, where we did have a general partner tip, we’ve also provided a cohort-specific tip. And now the page reads that “this cohort tip currently overrides the general tip.” It says, “Many organizations have policies providing additional detail.”
And third, you can see there’s a tip for Task 3. It says, “This is a cohort-specific tip – no general tip,” indicating that you’ve provided a cohort tip, but there was no tip at the partner level that’s being overridden.
And then this is what your users see. When they’re on the project side, they see that there’s a button to contact the cohort – provides the name, email, phone, and other basic details you’ve provided about the point of contact for that cohort. They see the tip here – so this will either be the general tip that’s pushed down if there is no cohort-specific tip, or this will be a cohort-specific tip if provided. And then they’re still able to add their own notes, so the users of the project still have their own ability to add kind of their own notes and references inside each task as well.
This screen shows you that at the top, you can provide a different logo for each cohort if you want. As I mentioned, the default logo that’s pushed down onto the Navigator for each associated project is that of the partner, but if they’re part of a cohort that you’ve set up, and you’ve elected to change the logo for that cohort, that logo will change. And this is useful especially if you’re an implementer working with multiple utilities, and the utility would like to be the face of the program, and they want to include their logo on the Navigator versus your own. So as the implementer, you can still be the partner, you can still do all the administrative, but you just have the ability to put the utility’s logo up on the cohort and on the Navigator, and thus also on the co-branded recognition.
Referral links – how do you get people into this Navigator, and what do they see? When you establish your partnership, in any cohort, you create a referral link. And this link can be provided to people that have already created a Navigator project, and they can go into the Manage Projects section and change that entry, which will then associate them with your project, and both sides have to agree to this, so they both have to provide the referral link, and then they have to confirm that they’re looking to join your partnership. Or there is a generated URL that can – people can use and click on, and it connects them instantly to your Navigator, and connects them to the Create a Project page. So those customers that you’ve just recruited to join your cohort or you want to put under your partnership, you can provide them this link – it’ll get them started very quickly as they make a project for 50001 Ready.
All right, we’ve hit our pause point where we’ve gone through the walk-through, and we’ll go to the little mini-demo. I see a couple questions have come in.
The question is, in a situation where a utility has engaged an energy service firm to work with their customers, is the partnership typically between the utility and the manufacturing facility, or can it include all parties?
This is one kind of confusing thing about the language we use, and maybe it’s the – one of the ways I’m presenting it is that there’s a partnership in the context we’re talking about between any organization, but mostly we’re talking about either the utility or the implementer, or consulting business, and the Department of Energy. And then underneath that, you can have your customers – the actual individual facilities – join under your partnership. So the utility has engaged an implementer – the partnership can either be the utility to the Department of Energy, and the utility can add the implementer staff to their partnership, or the partnership can be from the implementer to DOE, and the utility can add utility staff to have insights to the progress of customers if they want. So it’s flexible – it can work either way, but in the context of what we’re talking about with the word partnership, and partner – we’re talking about a partnership between a company – a utility implementer or other consultancy – and the Department of Energy.
All right, we’re going to switch to a little quick mini-demo. This is not meant to be exhaustive at all – this is meant to just kind of give you a little bit of a flavor of clicking through the actual partnership itself. Here you can see I’ve switched over to the dashboard of ABC Utility. This is their partner dashboard – I’m the main point of contact, and the main partner level has this reference code of ABC Utility that can be provided to customers to get them in under your partnership.
I can update the General Information, as we showed in the static walk-through. And probably almost most importantly, I can manage associated users. So here you can see the four people that are associated with ABC Utilities partnership – myself and Sandy with full administrator access; Aimee and Mike having restricted access to individual cohorts. I can click Update Access Levels, and for Sandy, I could remove her from being a full administrator of the partner, and give her different levels of access on individual cohorts. Or I can return and give her full access to the partnership.
I can see that there’s four projects that are connected to this partnership. There’s one project that’s not in a cohort, and that I have two cohorts – I have the Pilot cohort, and the 2019 cohort. I have an internal title for each one, I have a public title – so these both have been branded under the same moniker of Manage Energy, so that’s what the public sees – and I have a reference code that projects can use to immediately join this specific cohort.
And down below, I have all of the four projects that are associated with this partnership. And it indicates not only their progress through the Navigator, but also which cohort they’re in. And supposing a project accidentally joined a wrong cohort, or joined at the partner level and needs to be filtered into a cohort, you have the ability of moving individual projects between no cohort and specific cohorts.
You have the ability to leave your own internal notes that the projects don’t see, about those facilities and those projects, and you can remove them and you can also remove cohorts. Going back up to the top – where did it go – tips – Partner Tips. So this is that top-level tips that I mentioned before, that would go down to all cohorts. So this cohort will be pushed down to all cohorts and projects associated under the partnership … your last 12 months of energy bills to your kickoff worksheet. Generically true for this partner for the way they do their SEM program. And then I can come back down to the partnership – the cohort levels, and I can look at their individual tips. And here I see the specific tips, and that there is no specific tip, cohort tip, for Task 1 – so it’s pulling down the general tip. They do have a specific tip for Task 2 and 3, and it indicates that it’s overriding a general tip, and it indicates that there was no general tip for here.
And here you can see the logo has changed – this is a different logo than the partnership level, showing that we can change the logo for each cohort. So what does this look like? This is kind of a mockup of the utility side – I’ve made a couple cohorts, I’m through the association of users, I’m kind of pretending that Aimee is an implementer and Mike is an implementer, and I’ve given them limited access just to see specific cohorts that they’re implementing for me. So Aimee’s implementing just full access – I’m sorry, implementing the 2019 cohort, and she has full access to that. So, if you’re the implementer and you’re also a partner, or not a partner but you’ve been invited to this cohort to see it – what does that look like? So I ask that Aimee share her screen now, so that you can see from the implementer perspective when you’ve been invited, what that looks like.
And here you can see that she has gone to still the ABC Utility partner dashboard, because that’s the partnership she’s associated with here, and that she can only see the ABC 2019 cohort, and the two associated projects for that one cohort. She does not have an ability to change partner-level information – she cannot change the partner-level tips. She can view them, but she can’t update them. But she can update the cohort-specific tips because she has full access to this cohort. If she was only providing view access, she could see them but again, not update or change any content.
So, I recognize that is a really quick walk-through, really quick little mini-demo of what this looks like. I really want to get to your questions, and I also recognize that this is the kind of thing that probably takes a bit of time to digest and think about, but I want to kind of open it up and through the chat box see if you guys have any questions that we can immediately answer right now about this functionality.
Sandy: And this is Sandy – I’ll just interject a little bit while people are typing away, I hope, on their questions. It is – you know, we intentionally didn’t want to run through every potential iteration of this, because it’s probably confusing enough just to see this. And that’s why we have initially set it up where you submit your request to become a partner, and you have a one-on-one conversation with LBNL because they will help you structure this in the way that makes the most sense for your particular needs. And so that’s really why we’ve kind of – at least initially here – set this up as a bit more of a one-on-one effort to get started. I mean ultimately down this road, this could be something that you could do completely in an automated, you know, fashion down the road when people get more comfortable with it, and quite frankly when we get more comfortable with it.
And I think a little bit pertaining to the prior question – the partnership relationship is not envisioned to be end-use customers with DOE directly, so it’s always envisioned to some sort of either a service provider – you know, you’re an engineering firm service provider you’re an implementer service provider, or you’re a utility program, and the utility programs can get relatively complicated – that’s why we’ve tried to make this so flexible. That partnership would be between those kinds of entities and DOE, not with the actual end-use customers. We wouldn’t really envision that.
Peter: So Sandy, while people are thinking of last questions or formulating their individual contact with us later, want to walk through the other updates from DOE?
Sandy: Yeah – yeah, absolutely. So, since we’ve last spoken to you, we’ve been hard at work. I think probably one of the things that many of you quite interested in is, you know, how is the 50001 Ready program going to address the new ISO 50001 2018 update? And after much discussion and thought, we will be doing a fairly significant revamping of our Navigator to be more aligned with the 2018 update. And there were a couple rationales behind this decision – one of the rationales was, is that – well it’s a couple – one of the things that the 2018 update – 50001 update – was, is it did two things in particular – it aligned the energy management standard, the structure of it and the requirements of it are much more closely with 9001 and 14001, so in other words, all of the key main ISO standards are now more structurally aligned. 50001 was kind of an outlier. And that’s important because we envision that a lot of the folks who go through this process have other backgrounds in ISO.
The other reason we decided to do this is that the promise was basically made on the part of the folks that do this update, and that while there will be continuous improvement, and there will be changes and updates over time to these various standards – that they’re fairly committed to leave this higher-level structure that everybody’s conforming to that’s consistent across all of these standards. They’re committing to not messing with that down the road – you know, I don’t think that’s a guarantee, but that’s what they’re committing to now.
So over the course of 2019, and probably into the very first part of 2020, we will be restructuring and reformatting the Navigator to fall into compliance with and conformance with – I guess that may be a better word – the 2018 update. It’ll be – we hope to be a very organized process in the sense that we will keep the existing Navigator on, and then we will introduce the new Navigator 3.0, and then we’ll turn the other Navigator off, and we’ll give everybody enough time to move projects through and not people high and dry. So, the goal really is that by the fall timeframe, we’ll start to send out notifications in terms of when things will be transitioning and moving over. What we really want to encourage is if you’ve got – if your process of getting something started, or you’ve got companies that are ready to go, or you thought you were going to start something tomorrow or in June – don’t stop. You should have time to get through it – the transition will handle anything that gets started, you know, except for a week before we’re going to turn one off, and turn one on, we would probably tell you to wait. But at this point, don’t stop what you’re doing – keep moving on, and we will make it as seamless as possible for you to move through.
Just – I’ll drop down to the third bullet there – we do have a transition guide that we have posted online to help folks really understand what those changes are, and what it entails. So for those of you that are working with either certified customers, or are involved in the certification space already, or want to have a better idea of what’s coming, I strongly encourage you to take a look at that document.
Up to the second bullet, our playbook. So what our playbook is, this is a document that we were sort of encouraged to create as a companion to the Navigator. The Navigator, as most of you should know if you’ve looked at it or spent any time with it, or we’ve talked about it in the past – it is an online resource, and as an online resource, it is not structured to collect data, or to upload forms. It doesn’t have that functionality – it doesn’t have that functionality for a very important reason, and that’s that right now, it lives on a – you know, first the DOE and now the LBNL server. The average customer that you guys work with do not want to be uploading any of their data to anything that’s not, you know, comfortable to them – probably on their own server or maybe the utility. And we are very, very respective and responsive to that, that data privacy factor.
So what the Playbook is, is it is a – I don’t want to call it a downloadable version of the Navigator. The Navigator is really a list of – it’s kind of a how-to document, guidance, and have you completed it or not, yes-no, and then a whole bunch of guidance and references. The Playbook is a bunch of forms that you can fill out and it creates an Excel version of the ability to share and upload documents and work with documents.
I strongly encourage those of you who are working with customers in particular, or, you know, have a need or have needed things that were bigger and better than the Navigator, to take a look at this. We call this a beta version because we’ve never actually had an entire entity utilize this and give us full reaction, so if it’s something you – take a look, if you’ve got a customer you think it’ll work with, if you’ve got a cohort, etc., etc. – use it, work with it, and give us feedback. Because we think it’s a valuable tool, and we’re interested in getting feedback.
Also, we encourage anybody who can to participate in the upcoming SEM summit that’ll take place just before the ACEEE Industrial Summer Study this summer in Portland. We will be there in force – we will be participating in the summit and at the Summer Study, so it’s a good opportunity to get together and talk about the SEM world and 50001 Ready in particular. And then the last resource I want to point you to – a little bit different from what we’ve been talking about. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the suite of energy system software tools that DOE has supported for many, many years now – pump system assessments, steam system assessments, process heating, compressed air, air master tools, air master plus – all of those tools. We have been spending the last two and a half, almost close to three years, what we call refactoring all of those tools into a brand new integrated landing platform that works with all the modern software and technology. We think this is an incredibly powerful and valuable resource for particularly – this is really oriented towards the industrial or the manufacturing customer.
The major energy systems that most manufacturing facilities have both on the motors related side, as well as on the fuel side, so steam process heating, and then pumps, fans, motors, compressed air. In addition to being able to do assessments, it has a lot of shared reporting functionality, shared data functionality. It also is home to probably 30-40 simple calculators now that are growing. We are in the process of adding a treasure hunt feature. So for those of you that also have custom programs, we think this could be a very valuable tool. We’ve been told historically that when DOE develops something, the regulatory evaluator community is pretty willing to accept the data that comes out of DOE-developed resources. So if you are interested in learning more about the measure tool – beginning to take at look at it, and get familiar with it – please reach out to me. I’m the one that sends you all the invitations, and I will get you the link and get you some more information.
So that’s it for me – are there any questions come up?
Peter: One question – not on those content, but as we are a little bit, sheepishly I’ll say, still pushing all of the content from our development site to our live site, one of the things that was discovered by a number of people on the call right now is that the enrollment form is not actually live this very second. I know our IT people through chats right now are working on it, literally right now, but if you are very excited about this, if you want to get going right away, do not wait for an enrollment form – send an email to 50001Ready@lbl.gov, and say, “I want to be a partner.” And we will contact you and get it rolling. Don’t worry about an enrollment form. The enrollment form is a nicety for us, not for you. Just contact us – again, 50001Ready@lbl.gov, and just say, I want to be a partner, and we will get back with you immediately.
Again, all things 50001 Ready can be found at energy.gov/50001Ready - sample utility partner profiles, and program implementation guides, links to the Navigator and EMPILite tools themselves, and please contact Sandy on – to add others to this distribution list for these series, and any other questions about DOE engagement with utilities, tools, and energy management at large.
Thank you for joining today’s call. Sandy, I’ll turn it over to you to close, because I’m not seeing any other questions come up right now.
Sandy: Okay, so in closure – I will more than likely send out a follow-up email that contains the slides and some of the links we talked about. Additionally, as we noted at the beginning of the call, we do post all of the webinar series slide decks as well as the follow-up recordings, so anything you’ve missed in the past, or if you want to come back and revisit it, that’s available on the website. The recording does – because we have to transcribe it – it does take anywhere from 30-60 days to get the recording up, but the slides we’ll get up to you fairly quickly, and don’t hesitate to reach out, and thank you for joining us today.
Peter: And with that, I’ll say thank you, and again, feel free to contact us through 50001Ready@lbl.gov, and play around with the partner – to talk to us about more details about the partner platform or to sign up. Thank you again.