56 Energy Project Financing: Resources and Strategies for Success
Portfolio Manager, Target Finder, Financial Value Calculator, Building
Upgrade Value Calculator, and the Cash Flow Opportunity Calculator.
All of these tools are in the public domain and available at http://www.ener-
gystar.gov.Portfolio Manager
Peter Drucker’s famous maxim is, “If you don’t measure it, you
can’t manage it.” If your organization wants to use future energy savings
to pay for the implementation of energy efficiency projects now, you must
start by establishing the baseline of your current energy usage. ENERGY
STAR’s Portfolio Manager can help you do that. It is an interactive energy
management tool that allows you to track and assess energy and water
consumption across your entire portfolio of buildings in a secure online
environment. Portfolio Manager can help you identify under-perform-
ing buildings, set investment priorities, verify effectiveness of efficiency
improvements, and receive EPA recognition for superior energy perfor-
mance.
Any building manager or owner can efficiently track and manage
resources through Portfolio Manager. The tool allows you to streamline
your portfolio’s energy and water data, as well as track key consump-
tion, performance, and cost information portfolio-wide. For example,
you can:- Track multiple energy and water meters for each facility.
- Customize meter names and key information.
- Benchmark your facilities relative to their past performance.
- View percent improvement in weather-normalized source energy.
- Monitor energy and water costs.
- Share your building data with others inside or outside your organi-
zation. - Enter operating characteristics, tailored to each space use category
within a building.
For many types of facilities, you can rate energy performance on a
scale of 1-100 relative to similar buildings nationwide. Your building is not
compared to the other buildings in Portfolio Manager to determine your
ENERGY STAR rating. Instead, statistically representative models are
used to compare your building against similar buildings from a national
survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Energy