Establishing the foundation for energy management on university campuses via data analytics

Campus energy management increasingly demands a controlled and managed process for achieving the aims of cost control and operation effectiveness. A mature decision making process is driven by data gathering, analysis and reporting, as advocated by business intelligence (BI), which already has had broad impact on enterprises. The BI process has been widely adopted by universities in a number of areas already, including student services (enrollment) but less so in supporting areas like energy management. This paper describes an initial effort to apply BI practices to manage energy (starting with electric power) consumption on campuses, beginning with a needs assessment to develop an effective energy usage data gathering (in real-time), modeling, analysis and reporting process on our own campus. We provide details on how the situation was at the beginning of our four-month project, and on the improvements we were able to make to the campus´ energy management process.