Energy benchmarking FAQ

Whole-building data means electrical usage amounts taken from all the meters in the building. It is important that you provide all the meter numbers for each building in the Electrical Usage Data Request Form.

The reasons for this vary, such as:

• Aggregate usage data is required for the entire building to give it an ENERGY STAR rating.
• Due to privacy laws, building owners do not have the right to automatically receive specific meter data for an account that belongs to a tenant.

Data to be uploaded on a monthly basis.

If you have five or more tenants you are not required to attain signed electrical usage request forms from each tenant (signed request forms are only required for buildings with four tenants or less). 

Regardless of the number of tenants, you will have to gather all the meter numbers for the building and input them onto a spreadsheet and then upload the spreadsheet into the Electrical Usage Data Request Form.

No. The two programs are not connected so you will need to complete the steps outlined for energy benchmarking. 

Attribute points live at the ‘property use level’ in Portfolio Manager, but the consumption itself is at a property level. If this account has been setup up properly with these different retail spaces, restaurants etc. inside one building, then Portfolio Manager will divide the building consumption by the square footage for each space.

Resource Advisor creates a specific start time for data to be pushed to Portfolio Manager, which is a mandatory step in the program setup. Because the consumption data is “month-ised”, it always starts on the first of the month, but the start date is firm. Because each Portfolio Manager account has a different dataset with different bill dates, the program cannot look for data gaps and try to fill it on its own – and it’s not authorized to. It will be up to the user’s discretion to back-fill their data up to the program start if there are gaps.

Through Resource Advisor, Rocky Mountain Power supplies your Portfolio Manager account with each building’s electrical usage, whether it’s on a campus or a single building. You will have to set up your Portfolio Manager account to have it combine these totals into a campus level. You will setup Portfolio Manager to take the total usage for each building and combine them into a Campus Total.

Yes, though it can take 24 hours for the data to sync. Data transfers occur during the night.

If you are just reporting energy usage, request a high/low average for your account by calling us toll free at 1-888-221-7070.

If you need to report an ENERGY STAR Score, then you will have to either upload your annual usage data directly into ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager, or complete the Electrical Usage Data Request Form to request one-time data from Rocky Mountain Power.