Establishing a comprehensive energy budget provides our clients with an invaluable tool for all subsequent energy initiatives. The budget creates a foundation that future energy initiatives can be built on. The budget consumption and cost profile at an individual account level serves as a baseline for future procurement strategies and project impact analyses. The in-depth understanding of our clients’ energy systems that results from the creation of a detailed budget allows the CES team to be proactive in identifying opportunities and nimble in reacting to an ever-changing market and regulatory landscape.
The budget serves as a key tool in evaluating procurement strategies. When a CES client seeks to sign a new supply agreement or hedge a position in the market, the budget provides a useful reference point to assess the financial implications. By having an established consumption profile, CES Analysts can quickly project the impact of various potential procurement options and see how those compare to historical rates. In setting budget values for unhedged market positions, the CES team will collaborate with clients so that market risks are clearly identified. Subsequent rounds of pricing and product options can be quickly compared with the budget forecast to determine the impact on budget.
Whether you’re trying to validate savings resulting from energy efficiency projects, monitor major cost drivers, or forecast energy consumption and costs into the future, it is often helpful to supplement the budget with actual use and cost information throughout the year, to see the total picture. The CES Variance Tracker tool provides a snapshot of performance compared to expectations across a variety of dimensions, giving our clients a comprehensive understanding of their energy use and costs.
The Variance Tracker looks at actual consumption, costs, and rates to show our clients exactly where their monthly costs differ from budget expectations. Consumption patterns can differ from historical trends for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, these differences are the result of a particularly cold winter or hot summer. Sometimes they can lead to investigations into facility performance, flagging areas for operational changes or future efficiency projects. In other cases, rate variances will spur detailed audits to identify billing problems or highlight the impact of a utility rate change. As trends develop throughout the course of a fiscal year, CES works with clients to understand these variances and set expectations for the remainder of the fiscal year. This allows clients to update their budget offices and react to variances as they appear, instead of retrospectively at the end of the year.
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