Energy Tracking System

One of our activities over the past year at Climate Protection Campaign has been to set up an energy tracking system for all nine municipalities in Sonoma County, along with the County and the Water Agency. This system allows us to generate reports that show all the electricity and natural gas use by municipal, county and water agency operations. Our database contains five years of historical billing data with usage amount and cost for over 2000 accounts that exist at over 600 physical sites.

We can aggregate by facility type (building, water/wastewater, streetlighting) and by city. We can also show trends in energy use, and show the effect of energy efficiency measures. Using this tool, we can calculate the total GHG emissions due to electricity and natural gas use from city operations. This is the tool we will be using in Sonoma County to track progress toward the GHG reduction goal set by each city. Using this tool, we can also track emissions from fleets, and due to solid waste.

We developed a "data-mining 'bot" to automatically collect billing data for our nine cities from the PG&E website. This requires authorization from the city governments. All of our data collection activities have involved obtaining authorization from the governments for the utility, which then sends us data electronically. We can import the data into the database automatically.

One of our cities is a municipal utility district. The only way they could supply us with billing information was in paper form. They gave us a big box full of paper bills. All of that had to be entered manually.

We do extensive quality control work on the sites associated with the energy consumption data. We verify the address, facility type and square footage. This enables us to report energy efficiency metrics such as kWh/sq ft, or btu/sq ft.

We use a program called Utility Manager Pro. It was developed by Save More Resources