New York is entering an era in energy that will be as exciting as it is critically important. Faced with a long and growing list of unprecedented challenges – extreme weather caused by climate change, society’s increasing dependence on digital technology and demand for energy, and the aging of our existing energy infrastructure to name a few – the State’s leadership has been among our nation’s most proactive in embracing the urgent necessity of transition towards a new energy paradigm.
Enter the New York State Public Service Commission’s Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) initiative. REV lays out a framework for energy innovation and poses a number of questions and challenges to the energy industry.
Recently, we were given the opportunity to comment on an aspect of the REV initiative that is near and dear to many of us here at Bright Power: data access. As those of you familiar with our EnergyScoreCards platform are surely aware, we are firm believers that electronically-accessible, standardized, high quality utility bill data is key to unlocking widespread energy improvements in buildings. Utility bill-based analytics enable us to find where buildings are wasting energy, and to follow buildings’ energy usage over time, providing the feedback that shows us what is working and where we need to improve.
Streamlined energy data access is good for energy consumers and good for business. Accurate energy usage data is currently difficult to track down and hard to process. Businesses that could be developing the next energy breakthrough are instead diverting resources to data gathering, processing and cleaning, or choosing not to even enter the field at all. Energy consumers, on the other hand, are wasting energy (and money) with no reasonable way of seeing that on their own. Both are real problems that we’re fighting to correct.
While we at Bright Power recognize that better access to data alone will not solve our energy problems or prevent the next energy emergency, it is an absolute necessity if we want to find the waste, fix the problems and follow the results to guarantee that we’re moving in the right direction.
Special thanks to Klaar de Schepper who led our efforts to respond to REV as well as our participation in the Mission:Data industry working group.
