Energy Optimization Resources and Tips

Understand Energy Consumption Data - GridPoint

Written by GridPoint | Sep 12, 2020 4:00:00 AM

Billions of data points – dynamically, and exponentially growing each day. Which data points matter? Which is trending in alignment with your energy goals? Which are indicators of the path to the facilities maintenance graveyard?

GridPoint Energy Manager’s extensive reports and visualizations organize your data and paint a picture of energy usage within and across sites.  These tools, built and curated by the GridPoint Energy Advisory Services team, are designed to help answer these, and many other questions that arise when leveraging big data.

Site Comparison Visualizations

Site comparison visualizations take equipment-level data from single sites and compare it to a performance baseline. This easily identifies any performance outliers and enables managers to make better decisions based on data, decisions on how to lower energy bills, manage buildings better, and improve processes to organize day-to-day chaos.

They aid in deriving:

  • How a single location is performing against itself.
  • How a single location is performing against its peers.
  • What assets are driving negative or positive performance?
  • How the enterprise as a whole is performing against a selected period.
  • What types of energy consumption have changed, and how?

Visualization 1: Submetered Load Summary

This report leverages big data to display energy consumption, by data source, across the entire enterprise. At the top level, users can filter comparisons over time, region, equipment (HVAC, Refrigeration, etc), or by site size. This is often used to identify and compare energy consumption trends, as well as calculate the variance from the previous period. The graph is showing that, on average, HVAC units across sites in the Southeastern United States sites are performing better in 2014 than they were in 2013.

Visualization 2: Unoccupied Main Load Comparison

This report compares a location’s unoccupied main load kWh, across a defined period of time, to identify if the load has increased unexpectedly.  Users select a ranked list of problem locations in the top left table. Corresponding points are then plotted in the chart to the top right, which compares the current data over a previous period.  Changes in lighting programming, building controls, or site-specific behavior become evident when the patterns are not aligned.  This is often used to identify wasted energy during unoccupied hours, which negatively impacts a site’s bottom line.  Action can then be taken to fix the problem at the site level.

Visualization 3: Site vs Peer Comparison

In this report, users can select up to 5 locations from their enterprise directory and compare their energy and facility data. The directory includes data ranging from geographic roles to building/facility type to the date of the last renovation.  Once comparison sites are selected, corresponding data trends are plotted in a monthly heat map format, daily linear graph, and total pie chart – each split by data source (main load, HVAC, etc.). This is often used to detect positive or negative consumption changes among similar sites.  For instance, a user could compare a site that recently received a lighting retrofit with a site that did not see its effect on lighting kWh.


Advanced reports are designed to organize and present the data that is most relevant and important to your specific business.  These visualizations, and more, are available with GridPoint’s Advanced Reporting capabilities.  Some customers have internal teams to access and analyze their data, and many rely on GridPoint’s Energy Advisory Services to do this for them and recommend custom solutions and strategies.  For more information on GridPoint’s Energy Advisory Services or reporting capabilities, fill out the form below, and an Energy Expert will be in touch with you shortly.