The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) hosts the 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 with presentations and discussion, stakeholders can learn about DOE energy management resources. In addition to the ratepayer community learning from its shared experiences, DOE receives feedback on how to build additional value into the 50001 Ready for program administrators and implementers, helping steer updates to existing tools and development of new ones.
The inaugural webinar attracted more than 80 participants. Presenters from DOE and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory introduced the series, described the DOE 50001 Ready Utility Network Series’ purpose, and emphasized DOE’s interest in adding value to utility and PBA communities. The agenda included an overview of the 50001 Ready recognition program, the 50001 Ready Navigator (a web application that provides step-by-step guidance to ISO 50001 implementation), and EnPI Lite (a set of online energy performance tools). Participants also discussed customer recruitment for 50001 Ready types of programs.
50001 Ready
Utility Network Series
March 2018
Transcription
Peter Therkelsen: This is Peter Therkelsen with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and I’ll be running the slide deck in support of Sandy Glatt of the U.S. Department of Energy as we go through this first ever D.O.E. 50001 Ready Utility Network Series. Today’s presenters will be Sandy Glatt with the U.S. Department of Energy, myself with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Christine Wu, also with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
So today’s agenda is going to be very focused on the audience at hand, which is the utility and public benefit administrator community, and its relationship with DOE and the 50001 Ready materials. So we’ll go through what is the DOE 50001 Ready Network Series, why is this all happening, why are we looking forward to your engagement, and why you should participate, a very brief introduction to ISO 50001, the relationship with that with the Department of Energy, and the utility/PBA community, the 50001 Ready tools and recognition program, and then Christine will provide a deeper dive into the 50001 Ready Navigator, the core tool that supports the 50001 Ready activities at the Department of Energy.
And with that, I’d like to turn it over to Sandy Glatt to present the materials moving forward. Again, everyone is on mute right now, and you can send questions through the chat box, which we’ll then answer break points where we will unmute everyone and also allow for voice questions.
Sandy Glatt: So, thank you Peter and Christine, and thank everybody for joining us this morning or afternoon, depending on where you are, and a special thank you to those of you out east who are potentially braving weather to be with us on this call, and also a brief apology for having sent out, having to have sent out two calendar invites – I hope that wasn’t too confusing, but we will hopefully avoid that in the future, and then another thing before I get started is I want to make sure people recognize that this is – since we are the federal government – this is a completely open invitation and forum, so please feel free to share the calendar invites with anybody in your community or your stakeholder world without having to ask permission, and respond to me personally if you want to be particularly, or have somebody particularly added to the specific email list. So again, wide participation is what we’re looking for.
So, what is it we’re looking to accomplish with this series? Primarily, to help you learn more about the DOE energy management resources, and what our focus is and to help you be able to access them, but at the same time, create a discussion with the community, who would be potentially utilizing these resources, or leveraging them, not only to explore all the various ways that we can make them useful to you, or that you may make them useful, but to help us learn and work together to potentially identify additional resources, or modify and improve the resources that we have to support what you’re doing. And also to keep pace with our program and our resources, and one of the motivations for this is we’ve been socializing this activity for just about a year now, we’ve presented at a variety of conferences and we’ve had webinars and reached out to many of you in a variety of different forums, and we know because we’ve all been there that you hear something and it’s of interest, and you kind of park it in your brain and you go back to work and it finds itself moving its way continuously to the back of the burners and to the back of the burners, so our hope here is to help keep pulling this back up to the front burner, and maybe it’ll be on the front burner at the particular time when it’s most appropriate for you to utilize it. So that is one of our motivations for having this series. I also want to point out that this is not a generic strategic energy management or SEM effort. It is very focused on the Department of Energy’s resources and the utilization of those resources. So we know that several of you are participating in a variety of very positive SEM efforts, including a couple regional collaboratives in the Northwest and the Northeast, there’s a new US-Canada collaborative that’s in the formulation phases right now, these really look at on-the-ground support and resources in the more what I would call generic SEM space, we know that the Consortium for Energy Efficiency (CEE) has a – they have an industrial SEM committee, which is kind of a member-driven SEM program development effort and they’ve been very active in this space for quite some time – I suspect many of you have participated in that, and then we also wanted to bring to your attention the SEM hub, which is maintained by NEEA, the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance, a very nice resource for online guides, tools, videos, et cetera, in the generic SEM space. So we want to support and celebrate all of those sort of partnering activities. Next slide, please.
So, what you should ask from us. This is not a sales pitch – we don’t make any money off of this, we’re not in the market to sell you our products…what we really want this to be is a forum and a community of practice – an opportunity to discuss so you can learn from us what we’re doing and what our priorities are, and why, and more importantly, we can learn from you. So all throughout the process, we welcome your feedback on what content would be most useful and helpful, and again, on even what resources that we maybe can develop that would provide value.
What we’re going to do specifically today is we’re going to focus on the basics of the DOE 50001 Ready resources and tools, and I’m going to say resources instead of program, because we are not a program in the sense that utilities and public benefit administrators think of a program. We do not claim savings from what we do, we are not governed by any kind of public utility commission, and we are very specifically not out to compete with those of you that are. We have public benefits in the sense of broader public goals that we are out to achieve in terms of saving energy from a national perspective, but not in the same kind of way that a utility is. We think that’s very important, so I try to stay away from the word program as much as I can and talk about our resources and tools.
Future calls, just so you know, will not be so driven by the DOE staff and personnel, but we will be showcasing folks in the utility and public benefit community who are out there leveraging our resources, and how they’re leveraging them, and also over the course of time, we will talk about other resources that are under development or will be developing, not even only in the 50001 Ready space, but even more generically in the ISO 50001 and – missing a zero, sorry about that – and the even SEP resources down the road. Next slide.
So, we’ll unmute you very quickly and just see if anybody has any questions right now just in the overall scope of what this whole effort is all about.
Peter: So everyone is unmuted now...does anyone have any questions about the purpose and framing of this network series for Sandy?
Participant: I do not.
Peter: Okay, we’ll have more of these opportunities to ask questions, so we’re going to back on mute and move forward. Okay Sandy, you should be unmuted as well.
Sandy: Okay…am I unmuted?
Peter: You are unmuted.
Sandy: Okay, very good. Okay, so let’s talk about DOE and ISO 50001 as a foundational concept. So what is ISO 50001? I suspect most of you are familiar with it – it’s the international energy management standard that’s probably pushing on ten years, if not more, in the marketplace now. It’s a global framework for managing energy. It is what to do, not specifically how to do it. It follows other international standards, most notably, or maybe the most recent sort of related one is the ISO 14001 environmental management standard, and it’s being deployed fairly significantly on an international level – there’s a lot of international incentives that have promoted utilization of this, not quite as much domestically, but it is on a trajectory, and a trajectory of growth, and you know, we firmly believe that it’s going to become a common business practice.
Many of you are probably familiar with the CEE minimum elements on strategic energy management. I think what’s very important for us to point out here is that ISO 50001 is not different, per se, than the CEE strategic energy management elements. What it really is, is it’s just additional requirements and guidance. So, to some extent it takes those basic constructs and requires, as I said, some additional guidance and requirements and maybe just a little more rigorous would be a good way to describe it.
This whole, again, construct of SEM has really been growing in interest and magnitude over the past, certainly five, if not ten years. We at DOE have really kind of staked our grounding and our foundation in the ISO standard, and we’ve done this for a couple of reasons. We really are looking – we really look at energy management from the perspective of how do we make something happen, or how do we promote this, where it’ll be enduring, and where it’ll be continuous, and it’ll result in, you know, a stream of projects and a stream of savings, and a culture change, and a management practice. And that’s what we firmly believe that the ISO standard brings to the table.
So, you kind of look down this slide – as opposed to, you know, reacting to the most current change in pricing, or reacting to or looking at a specific project, or maybe just a, you know, lighting fixes and things like that – it’s a much more system-wide approach. It’s much more structured, it establishes processes that facilities or even entire entity units have to pick up and put across their entire structure. It requires executive decision, executive involvement, and engagement from the absolute top level, and one thing that we all probably realize, that if you don’t have management buy-in, activities are not going to fly, or they’re not going to be sustained. It’s resilient to turnover – a very important element of it. Probably you all have worked with customers, where you’ve had an energy champion, and the next thing you know, the energy champion leaves and the entire program falls apart. So, because of the cross-organizational involvement, it provides that resiliency. It’s based on a kind of proven management practice – the Deming Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle. It’s based on outcomes – it establishes operational controls and procedures as well as this process of a continuous improvement, so it creates this enduring practice. And, unfortunately the adoption levels have been low in the U.S., although they are growing, and one of the things that we have realized at DOE is that a lot of the resistance to adoption has been the, to some extent, the cost and the rigor of the certification process, which is really what led us to the development of the 50001 Ready. There’s a lot of the management structure elements that facilities and companies are doing on their own, or willing to do, are excited about doing. The intimidation level tends to come in on the certification piece. Next slide.
Some additional reasons that we have really kind of put our stake in this area…number one, it’s a culture change. If you change management practice, you change the way you do business in your company. Again, so that moves it out of the reactive, to the proactive. It’s a practice. It’s the way you do business. It’s the way you think. And these are what lead to the continuous improvement, the continuous savings, the continuous evolving element of the management practice. It has the important components that support the culture change and the management practice, which is commitment at the top level I mentioned previously, a structured form of data collection – if you don’t measure, if you don’t understand how you’re using your energy, what your energy use is, you cannot manage it. And it creates a value for incorporating energy into decision making overall. So there’s a value added to including energy in your decision making.
The chart below is one that we found very interesting at DOE. This is looking at two companies – 3M on the bottom, the orange and yellow, and then the blue and green is Schneider Electric, both of whom have been real energy efficiency leaders – obviously they’re big, proactive companies. If you’ll notice, the bottom lines are sort of measuring plants that they have been doing sort of their regular energy program. The top lines are those who have done ISO 50001 or the SEP program. And what you can see there is from already stellar achieving companies, the kind of energy improvement that you get in addition, by adding the ISO 50001 and the SEP.
It’s interesting to note, you know, so the one percent per year is what we kind of recognize as sort of business-as-usual. The top energy performing manufacturing folks are getting upwards of two-and-a-half percent per year, and if you look at the ISO, and the enterprise-wide, those are some companies including both 3M and Schneider who have done this in multiple facilities, are getting much more like four and five percent. The one thing I will say is that this may not be exclusive to just ISO and SEP – those couple of utilities and programs that have had several years of SEM programs in effect are starting to see these kinds of percentages as well. So I think it speaks overall for SEM. Next slide.
So, why you guys? We really want to increase the deployment of ISO 50001 practices in the U.S. As we noted, it’s getting much more international adoption. You guys have the best end-user relationships. You are the face of energy to most end-users, and therefore by logical extension, it makes the most amount sense for you to be the community that delivers and deploys this. This is not the business we at DOE are in. What we want to do is to be able to add value to your community as you leverage these resources, by providing different kinds of tools, and curriculum, and training, and a variety of other things that can help you be more successful. Next slide.
Okay, another break point. Peter will unmute you if you have questions.
Peter: Questions from the audience? (Sound of typing) No, hearing no questions, back to quiet typing. All right, Sandy…
Sandy: I’m still here, correct?
Peter: You are still here.
Sandy: Okay, I still have the same slide.
Peter: Trying to move forward. There we go.
Sandy: Okay, so 50001 Ready tools and recognition. Most importantly, these have been developed to be both actionable – you take them and you do things with them, and flexible. We are not going to tell you how to do what you do best. We don’t want to tell you how to do what you do best. We want to provide resources that make it easier for you to do what you do best – to help your customers move out in this space, and in particular as I mentioned before, without requiring certification.
So, what is 50001 Ready? From the DOE perspective, when you step away from the tools and resources, which we’ll talk about a little later, it’s simply from our perspective a recognition program. It is the ability to self-conform to the ISO 50001 energy management system, so to put in place all of the activities and elements of the energy management system, without the certification portion. Does that mean you can’t or don’t certify? Absolutely not. You are ready to certify – so if you choose, if you go through 50001 Ready, and you choose to go through certification, you can take those additional steps, and become 50001 Ready formally certified. And excuse me, ISO 50001 certified. But so, 50001 Ready is self-conformance – we at DOE, if the facility or the end-user goes through all of this stages, and then puts a – does a self-attestation, a very straightforward self-attestation, and Christine will run through this a little more later for you guys, that they have done all of this, DOE will recognize them, and that’s really the process from our end in terms of what we at DOE call ostensibly the program, so the recognition element.
It’s composed of two pieces then - so the navigator tool, which is a – we call it a TurboTax-like, and I guess it’s the season where many of you are thinking about TurboTax, so it’s the TurboTax-like yes/no resource, but it is within a series of yes or no questions, there’s 25 of them that you would answer that is supported by a whole host of additional materials that live within the navigator. So it’s got guidance, detailed guidance – it’s got light levels of guidance as well as detailed levels of guidance, and templates. It’s got team management capabilities, which means that several folks can work on an individual project or an individual facility collaboratively within the navigator. It’s got portfolio management and administration capabilities, which means a single entity can manage a portfolio of resources and projects, which I think is helpful for utility programs and folks like you who may want to oversee a cohort, or several folks who are doing this. And it is very adaptable for all kinds of different coaching or other program structures, so it can be utilized in we think almost an infinite variety of ways. And you’ll have a tour of the tool later.
The second piece of it is what we call kind of a lightweight online regression tool for calculating savings. In many – if you go directly to a lot of end users, they don’t necessarily have great resources for collecting and measuring and reporting their energy use or their energy savings. Many of you do have these kinds of tools, and this is not meant to substitute for those – this is meant to be an enhancement for those who don’t have those kinds of measurement tools. It’s a very important part of 50001 Ready, is to be able to collect and report and measure your data, because you don’t know how you’re doing if you’re not doing that. We don’t require any kind of specific tool being used. The navigator has – and we’ve set up, you know, that people who use Portfolio Manager and a variety of other of these kinds of tools, and tools that you’ve developed in your own utility programs are just fine.
Very, very importantly in this space, DOE does not ask for you to submit any data to us in terms of uploading reports or uploading specific data. When it comes to the recognition, we only ask that when the self-attestation form is submitted, that the end-user, the customer or whomever is submitting it, can in fact tell us that they have had energy savings improvements, that they tell us that they are measuring their energy, and that they are having improvement, but they don’t have to give us specific data. And I think that’s very important, because that can be intimidating. So, there is no uploading of data sheets to DOE, there is no uploading of data in the tool, any kind of template or worksheet is downloadable and stored on the user’s or whoever’s computer, but not given to DOE. Next slide.
Okay, so the navigator…as I mentioned previously, it is a step-by-step guidance to 50001 implementation, that was developed and maintained by DOE to provide free training and information to the market. Guidance has been provided in fairly easy-to-understand language, it focuses on actionable steps to get it done, understanding the practical application of the ISO 50001 energy management standard, and it would build very easily off experience of anybody who has done the 9000 or 14001, or even folks who have done Energy Star. So, customers or end-users with backgrounds in these areas – many, many elements of the questions and the activities in the navigator are going to be familiar and fairly straightforward.
It allows the tracking of progress, and as mentioned previously, facilitates team collaboration, and it includes a resource library with over 100 templates and a hands-on guide. So, to some extent, almost anything you would need in order to put in place that energy management standard exists and is accessible through the navigator. Next slide.
So, as I mentioned before – or maybe I didn’t – but it’s made up of 25 yes or no questions, each of those questions really is a step or a set of activities. They really fall into four fairly straightforward areas – planning, energy review, continual improvement, and system management. What I think is probably very relevant for many of you folks, if you look across this and you look at some of the areas and activities that are in these boxes, those of you who have SEM programs, or developing SEM programs, or maybe even have fairly extensive custom programs, there’s probably many of these activities that you’re doing, or that you do with your customers. So, from that perspective, you can sort of see, “oh, you know, we have an SEM program and we do expect them to have an energy policy, and we do expect them to put together an energy team, and then, you know, we do want them to collect data in certain areas, and, you know, we want them to be monitoring and measuring and we have training.” So as you look across there you can see that many of these activities possibly already exist. So there might be a lot of cross-conformance already with your existing programs, and therefore the navigator and the 50001 Ready can be a very adaptable tool to what you’re already doing. Next slide.
So who are the prime customers? I think the most important message we want to tell you…and we’ve gone to one additional slide…back up. Okay, it is not just industrial. In fact, we have a variety of different customers, okay, government facilities, we’ve had water/wastewater facilities, we’ve had some school districts.
[Issues with slide transition] I think Peter’s having a…I’m sorry, there’s an errant animation transition here…I don’t know what that means. It means keep going. Okay, I need the slide. We’ve lost your screen Peter. All right…go ahead and present this one slide right here and I’ll go back to full screen afterward.
Okay, well there we are. Okay, so again, just quickly, it wasn’t that important, but K-12, universities, data centers, distilleries/wineries, as well as multi-family. So again, this is, you know, industrial, it is commercial, it is institutional. How do you get started? Couple of opportunities…one way to get familiar with this is potentially pilot this in your own facilities, whether you’ve got, you know, your own buildings, you know, your own commercial properties, whatever…it is an opportunity. I also want to mention that the regional energy efficiency organizations around the county, the Northeast, the Northwest, the Midwest, the Southeast, and the Rocky Mountain area, are all engaging and are available to partner with to do some pilots with utilities and programs. So those of you that have relationships with NEEA and NEEP and MEEA and CEEA and SWEEP – reach out to them, if you’re interested in this, because they can potentially partner with you on piloting this in regions. And if you don’t know who those folks are, shoot a question in the question chat box and we’ll get back with you on how to reach out to those folks. And then you want to get to the next slide, Peter.
DOE doesn’t want to own this. We think utility ownership of this is really the direction we’re going, for various kind of different levels of engagement. It’s low-risk for customers, it is no cost, to you, or to your customers, from us, it is self-paced, and it is non-certifying. We’ve developed the platform, and we also have and are in the process of developing training and training-related resources and available curriculum, which will be the subject of future of these webinar series. You can leverage 50001 Ready in multiple ways. One, as a program, where you provide resources, you provide the portal, you support your customers and you claim the savings. We also think that it is a great, just simply customer engagement, customer support vehicle. It’s a means to start communicating with your customer, start talking about energy. They can start to utilize and look at the navigator just to answer questions: do you think about energy? Do you have an energy policy? Do you have energy goals and resources? I mean, there’s a lot of customers I’m sure you have that don’t even have energy on their radar screen, and so simply as a means to get them engaged and start dialogue, it’s a great tool for doing just that.
As I mentioned, there’s various levels of engagement options, from directing your customers to the DOE resources to the DOE website. We do provide a help desk, we maintain the tools, the help desk, we do the recognition as I mentioned, and we can help report savings back to utilities. Utilities can recruit the members and send them over to DOE, et cetera, et cetera. Or, we have mechanisms – and where we’re really interested in going – is for utility owners, where we can actually transfer the tools and resources directly to the utility. We have already worked in the space of co-branding the navigator, so that the navigator looks and feels more like your product, with your coloring and with some of your own language, where the utility can actually host the navigator on their website, and do much more of the active engagement, and we can do co-recognition, the utility can do recognition, I mean, again, it’s flexible and there’s a variety of models and as I said I think it’s maybe infinite. Next slide.
Just an example of three fairly different folks that are already utilizing it, and what’s important here is they’re utilizing it in extremely different ways, and these are some of the folks that you’ll hear from in future webinars to talk about how they’ve integrated 50001 Ready into their various offerings and their programs. Next slide.
So what’s coming up? Visit the website. Get familiar with the navigator, the tools and the resources. And you download utility partner profiles and program implementation guides that are all coming along, and you’ll find the links to the navigator and the EnPI Lite. As I said, contact me to add others to the distribution list or feel free to forward calendar invites. And then there’s a place to sign up for a – we have a newsletter as well as for other kinds of email updates, not just on 50001 Ready but on both ISO 50001 and other DOE related programs. And this is – as Peter said, these slides will be made available after the call.
Just some ideas in coming series – measuring energy performance, setting up a help desk, developing your own recognition program, and training and curriculum, are all topics that will be coming up in future series, just so you kind of know what to look forward to.
And again, let me just jump back up to the top there – we are developing and soon to release on the website a program reference design, which has a lot of the resources and materials that a utility or an implementer would want to utilize to help design a program. And then some templates that give kind of different examples – and we’re going to develop these as they go along – I know we call it a template or maybe a little case study or a little fact sheet, that give samples of how folks in a variety of different ways utilize 50001 Ready. We know that you guys – many of you make a living on developing your own programs, and that’s great, we think this is a resource that can support that. As I said, we aren’t there to compete with you, we’re there to help you develop better resources and to deliver to the varieties of different customers. And with that, I think we have another question and answer period before Christine takes over.
Peter: That’s correct. I’m going to unmute everyone and hear if there’s any questions from the audience.
Participant: Hello Sandy. This is Todd Amundson, Bonneville Power. Just a question for utility interested, say an electrical utility, and 50001 Ready covers all fuels, does the DOE provide any technical resources for those other fuels, per se, to help a facility kind of set up a tool?
Sandy: If I’m not mistaken, and I may let Peter answer this question – the EnPI Lite. that we developed does allow folks to measure out different fuels independently, and to sort of address exactly that. Peter, do you want to confirm that in case I’m not totally understanding?
Peter: Yeah, I’ll build on that a little bit Todd, thanks for your question. First, starting with the navigator itself, which is based on the principle of ISO 50001, which is really about the business practice of managing energy, and 50001 really speaks to managing all energy sources, regardless of you know, who’s supplying it. And so, the navigator still points to that, that of all energy sources should be managed. Now, for an individual utility program, there can be an emphasis on, we’re really looking at electricity here, and you know, that might not then rise, if it’s just the customer’s (unintelligible), it might not rise to the level of DOE recognition but that’s okay. The point is that, a utility – electric utility can still take the navigator, and use it for its own purposes and its own programs, and that’s great. As Sandy mentioned, EnPI Lite tool, which is not required for use in the recognition program, or use as part of the navigator – it has the ability to evaluate regression-based energy savings from any number of fuels and electricity. So the customer or utility can point to doing – looking at one or multiple energy sources. Again, the general philosophy of ISO 50001 is to evaluate and manage all energy sources, but for the purposes of any one given utility, they can make use of those resources for their specific needs.
Todd: Thank you.
Participant: This is Jim with Puget Sound Energy. I’m curious as to the folks who are using it today, for your result and some of the other regional organizations and so on – kind of a little background on how they got engaged, and perhaps what their experience has been in using it, and the kind of lessons you’ve learned to date from the users.
Sandy: Well, thank you for asking that question. Those are going to actually be specific presentations on future webinars. I don’t know – were we going to have Greg make a couple remarks, are we able to do that? If he’s still on, if he hasn’t left. From Efficiency Vermont, he was one of the ones who was labeled there. He was going to give just a very couple of remarks. We’ll give much more detailed presentations in the future, but Greg, are you still on the phone?
Greg: Yep, I’m here Sandy. Can you hear me?
Sandy: Did you want to just say how you guys got engaged? I mean, we’ve worked with Greg for a while, but how you’ve gotten engaged in what you’re looking at doing?
Greg: Yeah, so Efficiency Vermont, actually, was engaged with the DOE back with the SEP accelerator. So, we, in partnership with all the utilities like BPA recommended moving forward with kind of a smaller approach – easier approach to ISO 50001, rather than going right to SEP. And, we think this is a great tool, and the way we’re thinking of using it at Efficiency Vermont is really engaging those customers that might not have the opportunity to sign up for a cohort approach, but are ready to move forward towards ISO 50001, they’re down that path of energy management. It’s really a nice sole-source delivery of energy management, outside of the cohort approach that others might have joined in. And also for our customers that have gone through our CEI program, we’re thinking it might be a nice effort to roll 50001 Ready into the tail end of the cohort approach, where they’re pretty much done with their engagement in CEI, is rolling basically 50001 Ready as kind of a year 2, maybe year 3 engagement, to get them certified – at least, certified through the DOE, and potentially arc their path towards ISO 50001 certification.
Sandy: Thank you Greg. And so again, for the question asker, that’s exactly what we intend to provide more in depth – and then Greg, we put him on the spot here – but in our future calls, so hopefully that’ll be helpful for you as we move through this series.
Jim: Right. Appreciate it, thank you.
Peter: I have time for about one more question if there is before we launch into our deeper dive into the navigator itself. All right, Christine, would you like to share your screen? And I’ll put everyone back on mute, and we’ll have Christine give a demonstration of the navigator itself. Thank you for your questions, everyone.
Christine: Hello, all right, can you guys hear me? Okay great. All right, so I’m just going to run through kind of a live demo of the 50001 Ready navigator. If you would like to follow along, the URL is navigator.industrialenergytools.com. Just as a note, this will eventually move to a .gov address and at that point, that should be kind of a seamless transition for all of you when that happens. But, okay, so, the navigator in kind of summary is an online resource to move you towards ISO 50001, as you drive yourself towards the practices of 50001. So, the tool is pretty much made up of four major components, and so that is providing actionable guidance, also providing templates and kind of hands-on documents and resources for you to use, tracking and team management capabilities, and then access to the help desk. If we just kind of run through this, all of this guidance is available without creating an account, and it’s all available for free, so I’ll kind of run through this first and what you can access without even having to create an account, and then I’ll log in and show you kind of what capabilities are unlocked if you create an account.
So, if you go to the home page you’ll see some guidance on just how to get started with the navigator, and I’m going to jump straight to explore the navigator. You’ll see a pop-up that, you know, explains to you just generally how this works and gives you some tips for how to get started with this and kind of which resources to look at first. But basically, the navigator is a dashboard for you that walks you through 25 tasks, which Sandy mentioned, broken up into four major buckets, which you can see here. All of these tasks, then, are broken down into various levels of description. So, kind of the three main tabs – so for of each of these tasks, you’ll see that there’s multiple tabs of resources for each of them, and the three main description ones are the first three, for Getting It Done, Task Overview, and Full Description.
These kind of address different levels of actionability, if you will, so Getting It Done is almost like your straight-up checklist of what you need to get done for that task. I’m going to jump to full description – full description then breaks up those tasks that are listed in Getting It Done, and expands on them, to show technically how you might accomplish this at your facility.
And then if you would like a broader overview of how this particular task relates to the ISO standard, you can check out the Task Overview tab, which explains, you know, why is this task important, and ultimately what are you trying to accomplish with it?
Then if you jump over to this resources tab, you can see all of, you know, the templates, all of the hands-on guides, all of the worksheets that we have available to help you through this particular tab. You can also find this repository of resources, if you go up here to the right-hand corner and click on Resource Index. This has all of the resources listed for you, and you can filter them by the task. And you’ll notice that all of these are download-only. So, as Sandy mentioned, the navigator is intended as a resource for you and it’s not a tool for – we’re not requiring you to upload any documents to DOE. And in fact this tool does not allow for that. So you can download these and use them at your discretion and how you choose, you can modify them, do whatever you like with them, but we don’t ask for you to re-upload any of these back up to DOE.
Another resource that you can look at without logging in – you can see the Task Index, and this is a summary of all of the tasks. I personally find this to be very helpful. And then you can also access the FAQ’s – so you’ll see there are a bunch of FAQ’s here about the navigator, and also about the 50001 Ready program, as the latest program, so this is related to ISO certification, how this is related to SEP, and some questions for utilities and implementers. So, a lot of information can be found on this page and I advise you to browse through it at your leisure.
You can also access the Help Desk. So, in this contact link, you can – this is a direct line to us at LBNL. So we run the Help Desk, and any questions that you send to us, whether it’s an IP issue, or your password isn’t working or something – those kinds of issues, we’ll take – but more importantly, if you have more specific questions about how to manage your EnMS, how to design your energy policy to take into consideration legal requirements – those kinds of questions we are happy to answer and we have a lot of experts on our side to help you out with those. So we advise – we recommend that you get in touch with us, and we can help you out with that.
Okay, so then once – to login, so if you would like to an account, if you haven’t created account, I’m going to walk you through this, but it’s pretty straightforward. All we ask for is your email address, and then, you know, create a password. But once you do that, then you can log in. And once you log in, that enables all of the progress and kind of team management capabilities that were mentioned earlier. So, you know, you can have multiple projects, multiple facilities under your account, and you’ll see if you log in, now you can have – now you have the ability to track your progress on specific tasks. So each of the tasks have four statuses moving from Not Started to Completed, and you can assign, let’s see, you can assign contributors and approvers for each task, and who’s working on it and who’s going to mark it off as complete. And with your login you can build your team like that, and then together check off the status of each of your tasks, and get an overview of this in your dashboard. You can see who’s working on each task, who’s approving it, when the status last changed, and the status of each task.
You’ll also see that you can communicate with each other, so, you know, you have your assignments of who’s working of your team, and then you can leave message for each other on, you know, where to find particular documents, since this is not an uploadable site, and also to track the history of, you know, who’s done what in this task.
You can also, in the navigator, see – so when you’re saving a project, you can indicate whether or not you have ISO or Energy Star experience, and if you do, then these transition tips will pop up in the full description of each of these tasks. And some of these, they’re very hands-on and they refer to very specific sections of each of the other standards, and hopefully that would help you transition practices that you’ve gained from other programs into – to make this easier for you.
And then finally, once you’ve checked off all of those 25 tasks as complete, you can then directly request recognition from DOE through the navigator. So really we only, we require just two things, which is an energy report, which is – you can use EnPI Lite as mentioned earlier, or Portfolio Manager, and this will be the subject of another call in the future, and then also your self-attestation form. So this a very simple form, that just requires two people to sign off on it, and then this is just you attesting to us that you actually have gone through all of the 25 tasks and implemented a 50001 Ready system at your facility. And then, so then you can just submit directly to us – this comes to our Help Desk at LBNL, and then within five days typically we try to issue that recognition.
Some other features to check out…My Tasks – this lists all of the tasks that are assigned to you, so you can, you know, see which ones you are the contributor for, which ones you are responsible for approving, and which tasks you might want to focus on, and you can do different filters for different projects and roles. You can also, if you have multiple facilities, use the My Projects Overview. And here you can see just the status of all of your projects – how far along you are, you can manage your teams here, you can manage the project, change the name, indicate whether it’s a test project or not, and do that all from a single space.
The navigator is also built so that all of its components, as we talked about, can be modified and used for your own purposes. I’m not going to dive into this – I think this will be a future webinar again, but should you choose to want to take ownership of your own version of the navigator, we would work with you to do that, and then you would have access to this admin section, where you can manage all of your users, all of your projects, and internally issue your own recognition if you’re setting up your own program.
I think that’s it – here’s our website, energy.gov/50001ready, this is a new design that just launched this week and I would recommend, you know, check out especially this For Utilities and Implementers page, some of the resources that Sandy mentioned, you know, sample design, all of this is available up there and we welcome your feedback on how these can be improved or what else we can do to help you out with your own programs. And then, finally, if you go to Contact, on our page, then you can find this email update link, if you just enter your email address here then you can be signed up for those monthly newsletters that were mentioned earlier. I think that’s it.
Sandy: Christine, I just want to add – you know, so this email update, it’s different than getting the notices for this webinar series, so that would be getting a broader set of notices in the SEP and ISO 50001 space as well as the newsletter and notices, and also Christine, are the videos on the navigator?
Christine: Yeah, actually I think they are. So if you go to any of these tasks, you’ll see this View Running module, and so these are videos that you can scroll through, you can watch, to get some more in-depth guidance for how you would accomplish that task.
Sandy: They’re very nice to walk through when you’re first starting – it’ll explain each task and anywhere from three to maybe seven or eight minutes, those are narrated and they explain what each of the tasks are, so that’s a very nice new enhancement.
So we have maybe a minute for questions in this space, I guess Peter are you going to unmute the crowd?
Peter: Everyone is unmuted.
Sandy: Questions on the navigator? I will also for folks that if you find this interesting, we at DOE are more than happy to do a much more detailed webinar on just the navigator and the tools for you or your staff or whomever – this was a very quick run-through. We know a lot of people who are participating in this call have seen these before, that’s why we kind of put this at the end, so people didn’t have to sit through it who have sat through it, or have a lot of familiarity, but if it’s something you want to get much more familiar with, we are happy – we can arrange that for you.
Participant: Yes, I’m with TVA – I was seeing if you had any information on what customers are seeing in terms of cost and amount of hours to implement a regular – like an ISO 50001 ready system.
Sandy: That’s an interesting question – there’s others on the phone who are unmuted who can maybe answer that. A lot of it really is going to depend on – I don’t know how to answer the cost question specifically, but cost is largely related to time when it comes to doing this, because you’re not paying for the certification. You’re talking about 50001 Ready, correct?
Participant: Yes.
Sandy: So you’re not paying for certification. It really has a lot to do with the background and the level of sophistication of the customer. Our very first customer who became certified had previously been part of a generic SEM cohort with a utility that was really just based on some seminars – there wasn’t even a whole lot of technical assistance, but there was some training. They were able to do it really, quite frankly, in almost a couple of days, which means that they had a lot of the elements already in place. If it’s a customer who has historic ISO background, it is much easier lift than a customer who does not. So, we’ve got some other folks that are working on it, I don’t know if Pete Langlois is on or some of the LBNL folks, people are taking a couple of weeks to a couple of months – it depends on how quickly they’re working on it, you know, but something in that timeframe. Does that sound right to folks who know?
Participant: Hi folks, it’s Pete Langlois, I hope you can hear me. Great. Yeah, it all depends on where you’re coming from. The other key thing, I guess, to emphasize, and hopefully this helps out, and we can probably get a little more deeper data if you need, is that you’re not taking somebody who’s having to work on this full-time, for that length of time. Most of the organizations that are implementing this have an energy manager, but the key aspect in building up a team is being able to pull in the resources from all over the organization, whether it’s training or procurement or maintenance or what have you, for dedicated periods of time. I mean just snippets of time almost as they’re putting this all together. And the entire process can stretch out for a good amount of time. But it’s really, again, pulling people in for those short periods of time.
We hear a lot of teams end up having monthly meetings, so I could a scenario where the folks who aren’t directly involved in energy management day-to-day might be involved one or two hours. So I hope that helps.
Sandy: Thank you. Again, because we’re ending on time, any other additional questions?
Participant: This is Neil. If Greg is still on the line, I’m curious if for Efficiency Vermont, what kind of assistance with the 50001 Ready that you’re providing to the customers, I like your approach, the way you’re targeting ones who didn’t get into a cohort, or don’t want to do a cohort for whatever reason, or the graduates and that makes perfect sense, and then I just wonder, are you kind of turning it over to them to follow up on their own with the 50001 Ready, or would Efficiency Vermont be providing some hand holding or assistance with these tools?
Greg: Hi Neil. Yes, we’re definitely providing continued hand holding, through our – basically through our account management team, walking them through the navigator tool, very similar to the energy management assessment as part of the SEM engagement, and also our energy consultants are engaged through their implementation of the EnPI Lite tool, which is basically just going to take our regression model that we have developed for that customer and plug it into the tool. So yes, there is still a lot of engagement and hand holding. So we’re just offering this up to our account manage customers at this point.
Neil: And then, have you thought about, would Efficiency Vermont be trying to claim any of the additional savings from those continued engagements – have you thought about that?
Greg: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we are definitely going to continually as – if we have regression model developed for customers, we’re going to continually – especially claim the savings we’ve only had a measure life of one year. If we can prove that engagement is still healthy and the savings persist, we’ll claim it for another year.
Neil: Great, thank you, that’s very helpful.
Sandy: So with that…can folks still hear me? So, we’re going – we will end this call, thank you everyone for making the time to be with us. We will convene again – not in April but in May, potentially, or hopefully the third Wednesday – we’ll stick with this schedule, and we will include the topic on the next call as to what our topic is going to be, as I mentioned again, feel free to reach out, and feel free to share these invites. And feel free to make – give us some things you’d like to hear about as well. So, thank you very much for joining us.