University of Arkansas
  Fayetteville, AR

EnergyWitness™ Customer Profiles University of Arkansas St. Joseph's Hospital Iowa State University

Transforming Utility Operations from a Cost Center
to a Standalone Profitable Business

The University of Arkansas in Fayetteville (UAF) has completely redefined how they operate and fund utility operations. By turning it into a standalone business that charges for services delivered to the 85 campus buildings, they are doing their own extreme makeover—from a large expense within the general facilities budget to a financially separate $10 million business.

A System-Wide View for a System-Wide Business

UAF didn't decide to operate as a separate business just for fun. It was the result of examining ways to address (aka fund) strategic utility plans and deferred maintenance. Making utility operations its own business requires a system-wide perspective of every part of the venture. Organizationally, the building staff, central plant operators, and utility teams had to come together and operate as a single unit (one wonders why it isn't this way everywhere, but that's a separate topic) to make the "business" successful.

There are six campus customer groups, each needing to pay for the utilities they actually consume, not just a blanket allocation of all utility costs. This requires a sophisticated approach to cost allocation, rate structures, and utility billing—leading to the birth of UAF's Automated Metering and Cost Allocation (AMCA) system.

AMCA needs a system-wide view of utility operations. It needs a software platform to consolidate data from a dozen different utility and operational sources. It needs allocation and invoicing capabilities on par with what utility companies have. EnergyWitness meets those needs.

The Automated Metering and Cost Allocation System

AMCA is built on the EnergyWitness platform. The data warehouse at its core collects and normalizes data from their building automation systems, meters, and utilities (see full list below). This feeds a fairly simple (conceptually) set of goals for AMCA—to allocate all the utility costs to the customers and supply information that is complete and prompt, making the users accountable for their consumption and provide incentives for conservation. It also has an operational component, furnishing data and tools for monitoring, diagnostics, and continuous commissioning.

EWUtilityBilling, the EnergyWitness cost allocation and utility billing system, is AMCA's interface to all campus utility data, meter data (automated and manually read), historical utility bills, and rate structures. It creates and manages deduct meters, virtual meters, allocated meters, and stipulated meters in addition to the utility main campus meters. And it generates properly allocated invoices and a variety of reports.

Data Sources

A single chart combines data from JCI, Carrier, electric company, gas company, and a local airport weather station, all aligned to the same 15 minute intervals.

As we've said, UAF is taking a system-wide view of utility operations. As such they are currently collecting data from the following sources:

• Johnson Controls control system (a few thousand points around the campus collecting chilled water and steam loop data)
• Carrier control system (300 points for a chiller plant)
• 217 purchased utility bills (electric, natural gas, and water) where they capture consumption, price, and billing determinants
• 96 deduct utility meters (these are read monthly for consumption for electric, natural gas, and water)
• 40+ stipulated and allocation meters (for steam and chilled water)
• 40+ building electric meters (they come in through Johnson)
• Virtual meters (used to determine lost and unaccounted for energy)
• Electric utility interval data for the four main feeds
• Gas utility interval data for one main gas feed
• Space planning data from their FAMIS system (used in cost allocation)
• Weather data (METAR data from four local airports)

Soon to be added to this list will be a Square D metering system. All of the data is either collected at 15 minute intervals or converted to 15 minute interval data and stored in the EnergyWitness data warehouse. In the case of purchased utilities and manually read meters, data is normalized to 15 minute intervals. The utilities group has immediate access to any collection of data points or summary reports through EWViewer and EWUtilityBilling.

Cost Allocation and Consolidated Utility Invoices

The costs are ultimately billed across six customer groups, but the allocation is much finer than that. Building and zone maintenance personnel, department heads, and others can view allocations for each of 85 buildings, and in some cases at the space level within a building. Each area defined within EnergyWitness has its corresponding FAMIS and HEGIS codes to know the characteristics of the space, and use that information in the allocation process.

Many of the buildings on campus have electric, natural gas, or water meters today, all of which are collected as we saw in the list of data sources above. The bills for these accounts are all captured with complete billing determinant information (there are 21 separate rate structures). The data is normalized to 15 minute intervals so that calendar-month invoices can be generated despite the wide variance of from/to dates across all the purchased utility bills (217 bills across five utility companies).

Allocated and stipulated meters are added by EnergyWitness to assist in the allocation of steam and chilled water generated by the UAF plant. The system uses actual operational data from the Johnson and Carrier systems to calculate consumption for these meters.

The university has established its own utility rate structure to charge for generated utilities and to pass through charges for purchased utilities. The rates are designed to recover the costs of running the utilities operation and provide incentives for customers to reduce their usage. The rates support demand charges or any number of other determinants.

Finally, the invoice is produced. Each customer receives a consolidated invoice containing consumption data and the billed amount for each of electricity, natural gas, water, chilled water, and steam. Since the invoices are for calendar months, each invoice is partially estimated based on the billing cycle of the purchased utility components, then adjusted the following month as needed.

Each building has operational data for each utility and its own HVAC operations aligned with billing information.

The Value of Combined Billing and Operations Data

AMCA offers a unique capability to the university customers—answers to the question, "Why is my bill so high this month?" By combining the billing and operational data in the same data warehouse, aligned to the same 15 minute intervals, the facilities staff has the capability to investigate billing issues and provide answers to help clients make appropriate corrections or adjustments.

Results So Far and Next Steps

So what's the bottom line? The first major accomplishment came early in the process. With the plans and business model in place, the utilities group was able to raise $23 million in bonded capital to undertake expansion, system replacement, and deferred maintenance projects.

The AMCA system is still a couple months away from completely replacing the manual Excel-based system, but the early results are very positive. Data collection has been ongoing for a year from the two building automation systems. Utility bill history exists for 18 months or more in most cases. Utility interval data, all types of meters, and complete rate structures have all been fully functional for many months. And a wide variety of detailed and summary reports exist, including roll-up reports that show all billing information across all buildings and use pivot table technology to allow drill down from annual to quarterly to monthly details.

Stay tuned as we continue to monitor and document University of Arkansas' accomplishments as all aspects of AMCA come on line for both utility billing and facility operations.