When it comes to sustainability, more companies than ever are talking the talk. There are few CEOs who would publicly admit they don’t care about the environment. But when it comes to walking the walk—changing your business practices and modernizing facilities to reduce your carbon footprint— not as many companies are doing their part.
That’s why it’s important for businesses who actually take sustainably seriously to differentiate themselves and demonstrate how they’re helping the planet. Plus, it’s likely that public companies will soon have a new mandate from the SEC requiring them to report on their emissions.
Yet, figuring out how exactly your business is saving energy and what that means in terms of carbon footprint reduction is not always easy or intuitive. Luckily, when you partner with Budderfly to get comprehensive sustainability enhancements for your business with no upfront cost, you also get access to a powerful tool and data resource: the Budderfly Portal.
The Budderfly Customer Portal provides deep insights into your energy consumption, savings, and carbon footprint. Here are a few of the ways you can use the information we provide to tell powerful stories about your sustainability, equipped with concrete data.
Budderfly’s portal shows how much energy you’re using each month. Better yet, our experts use your past energy bills to create a baseline average of how much energy you’ve used historically. Then, after we install high-efficiency equipment and energy saving technologies, you can see in the portal how much your consumption is reducing compared to the baseline.
In addition to how much energy you're saving in kWh, the portal also calculates how many metric tons of CO2 emissions you’re preventing as well.
Plus, in the portal you can break down your energy usage and savings into a lot of different factors for operational insights into what aspects of your business are using the most or least energy. It can be broken down by category, so you can know how your HVAC system, lighting, cooking equipment, refrigeration, and others are saving energy. You can even break down consumption by individual pieces of equipment and see how much they’re using hourly, daily, monthly, or annually—or even in real time.
If you own multiple businesses, you can see your cumulative savings or break it down by location to learn which are performing best and have the highest levels of carbon footprint reduction. We also provide clarity into the technologies we’ve installed and how they’re contributing to savings, so you can see the efficacy of each solution.
To most people, saying you’ve “saved a metric ton of carbon emissions” doesn’t mean much. Of course, it sounds impressive, but explaining what kWhs of energy and mts of carbon signify can be a challenge. That’s why the Budderfly Customer Portal includes reporting equivalencies, where your savings numbers are converted into numbers that are easier to comprehend.
These equivalencies include: gallons of gas, a home’s energy use for a year, cars taken off road for one year, pounds of coal burned, smart phones charged, and many more. Though still somewhat abstract, they aid sustainability storytelling by bringing energy savings to life with visuals and numbers people can relate to.
Showcasing how much you’ve reduced your greenhouse emissions is an impactful way to show consumers you’re truly committed to protecting the environment. But if you have a board of directors or potential investors who want to understand your sustainability efforts, there’s another metric you may want to include: cost savings.
The great news is that when you save energy, you save money. Energy efficiency has great financial benefits, especially when you don’t have to pay for new equipment upfront because you partnered with an energy-as-a-service company like Budderfly.
The Budderfly Customer Portal provides all the data you need on how you’re saving on energy costs. This can show important stakeholders that you’re approaching sustainability strategically and not sacrificing your bottom line. Our data makes it clear that energy efficiency is truly a win-win for businesses.
Proving your commitment to sustainability is vital, and armed with the right data, you can tell a great story about all you’re doing to help the planet and your business. If you’re not yet a Budderfly partner and are curious to learn more about our model and how you can get energy savings, contact one of our experts today.