Services

Tired of wasting precious budget dollars on late payment fees because utility bills were not processed on time?

Is your accounts payable staff struggling to keep up?

Would you like to be able to fully track all of your energy usage and expenses?

Would you like to be able to view an upcoming utility bill budget to allow for proper budgeting and cash flow monitoring?

Ever feel overwhelmed by the amount of effort required to gather, collate and compile accurate past utility expenses in order to prepare forward-year budgets and to compare year-to-year energy expenditures?

Now you can do all this and much more, and it’s a lot easier than you think. With Legacy Energy bill payment services you can insure that all your bills are processed and paid accurately and on-time, reduce the work load of existing staff, use historical energy usage data to plan future energy purchases and conservation initiatives, have access to every copy of every bill, view upcoming bill payment budgets in real-time, and easily access current and historical energy usage statistics. Best of all, you can do it any hour of any day, all from the convenience of your computer and web browser.

More than just a bill payment solution, the Legacy Energy bill payment service also provides tracking and reporting of all of your utility expenses, from the macro perspective of all of your facilities down to the micro level of one individual bill.

The Legacy Energy UtiliViz™ utility data management system is an easily accessible, continually available cloud-hosted platform that excels in providing vivid, customizable dashboard views of your utility usage and cost data.  UtiliViz™ provides organizations with a wide array of standard dashboards with the integrated ability to quickly and easily organize usage and expense reports by country, region, utility service, location, account, year and month.  UtiliViz™ also allows assigned stake holders to easily export both graphs and underlying data for rapid inclusion into ad hoc reports on an as-needed basis.

By taking advantage of its built-in reporting capabilities, UtiliViz™ users are free to run in-depth reports of all key utility statistics with simple point-and-click ease. Because UtiliViz™ is a web-based tool, your access options are diverse, are always on, and are highly customizable.

Just a few of the strategic data points available for reporting and tracking within UtiliVizTM include utility usage and cost data by:

• Country
• Region
• State
• Utility type
• Year (fiscal, calendar, custom)
• Month
• Annual
• Facility
• Square foot
• Overall trends by utility, region, project, business unit, etc.

Additionally, working directly with you and strategic operating units within your organization, Legacy Energy will gladly customize UtiliViz™ dashboards to meet your current and ongoing operational needs.

How would you like to be paid year-round just for agreeing to use less energy at peak electricity demand times?

That’s right, just for committing to participate in a demand response programs earns you a fixed revenue stream! In the event an emergency peak load reduction is not called for during your program enrollment, you still earn and receive payment for your commitment to the demand response program. While demand response programs are not available in every market, they are continually becoming more prevalent throughout North America and there is a good chance that your market has some type of program that you can participate in.

What is demand response? Demand response is the voluntary reduction of electricity consumption during periods of peak electricity demand or high electricity prices. Program participants earn revenue for agreeing to curtail electricity consumption when the local independent system operator (ISO) calls for a demand reduction (also known as a demand response event) to lower its system peak. While every ISO’s demand response program differs, generally they adhere to the following platform: Participants are paid a fixed sum throughout the year based on the level of energy curtailment they agree to reduce during demand response events. If actual electric grid conditions warrant a demand response event, participants are given notice to shed load. Upon successfully shedding their electric demand, the participant then earns additional payments tied to the amount of electricity they actually curtail during the event. These types of demand response programs are truly win-win situations for energy producers and energy consumers: they allow ISO’s to reduce peak demand while alleviating the need to build new peaking power plants, and they allow customers to be fairly compensated for contributing to the peak demand reduction solution.

“Demand response sounds too good to be true. Is there a catch or are there any reasons not to participate in a demand response program?” There is absolutely no catch. While demand response programs are not available in every market, they are continually becoming prevalent throughout North America and there is a good chance that your market has a program in which your facility may participate.

A very beneficial service to all commercial and industrial clients is an on-site energy audit. Legacy Energy’s energy audit is designed to provide you with a baseline view of your facility’s (or, for those of you with multiple buildings and/or locations, facilities’) energy footprint. The mechanics of the energy audit is an on-site inspection, survey and analysis of energy flow throughout a building, including internal processes and systems in order to allow you to fully understand the energy dynamics of a particular facility.

The overriding goal of any energy audit is to determine areas within your facility that present specific opportunities to reduce the amount of energy input into your facility without negatively impacting necessary operations.

The result of the preliminary energy audit is a report that seeks to prioritize a facility’s energy uses according to the greatest to least cost effective opportunities for energy input reduction. With the results of your energy audit, you and Legacy Energy’s next step is to prioritize and implement those energy-reducing solutions that best maximize your overall energy consumption.

Demand side management is a critical component of a successful overall energy management program. Demand side management, also often referred to as energy efficiency and inside the fence reduction, is generally broken into two categories: behavioral and physical.

Behavioral demand side management relates to how human interaction can be influenced to reduce the volume of an organization’s energy consumption. Are doors propped open in the spring to allow a fresh breeze to enter the building? Do employees leave their computer or overhead lights on when leaving the building for the day? Are conference room lights always on even when the room is not in use? Is staff permitted to have desk lamps? Does your organization have a formal energy awareness program?

Physical demand side management pertains to the implementation of physical improvements to systems within your facility that will reduce the amount of energy previously used to accomplish a task. The physical side of the demand side management equation typically involves greater scrutiny because of its capital expense requirements. Have energy-efficient lighting upgrades been implemented? Would installation of a new high-efficiency HVAC system significantly reduce your annual energy spend? Are on-site solar panels a reasonable way to offset peak energy demand? Does your information technology department factor power consumption into its data center and computer equipment purchases? Are new windows a viable solution for enhancing your building energy envelope? For all physical demand side management decisions, return on investment analysis is a necessary and often overriding consideration.

From creating highly interactive student and employee energy awareness programs to detailed ROI analyses of proposed system upgrades, Legacy Energy® has extensive demand side management experience ready to be put to work for you.

A major component of your company’s energy management strategy often includes implementation of physical and financial risk management strategies. The ability to proactively layer or hedge energy purchases for future periods can serve as a powerful physical risk management tool. Hedging portions of your projected energy volumes when commodity markets present strategic buying opportunities allows you to not only maximize your future energy savings, it also adds a proportionate level of budget certainty for a specific period into the future, whether your hedge be short-term (months), mid-term (quarters), or long-term (years). Additional physical risk management tools include but are not limited to triggers, caps and collars, stop loss orders, around the clock energy blocks, fixed price contracts, full requirements contracts, and index price contracts.

Financial risk management refers to the utilization of financial products to limit and manage your exposure to risks associated with future costs of energy. Many firms view financial risk management solutions as insurance policies. In most cases, financial risk management is carefully interwoven with physical risk management strategies to deliver an optimally planned energy risk management solution. Organizations most likely to incorporate financial risk management tend to be those firms that have substantial annual energy expenditures and desire the highest possible level of budget certainty.

If not the most important energy management area, tariff rate analysis certainly tends to be the most overlooked. As Rodney Dangerfield would have empathized, tariff rate analyses receive the least amount of respect among energy management core competencies.

At Legacy Energy, we place a great deal of value on tariff rate analyses. That is why review and monitoring of tariff classifications is an ongoing process. Working closely with the local utility company, we apply a great deal of focus on fully understanding the utility’s tariff offerings and ensuring that the tariff rate most optimal for your energy footprint is applied. Additionally, continuous effort is made to monitor ongoing revisions to utility tariffs. This is an area where Legacy Energy’s depth of experience and breadth of clients throughout the United States and Canada creates a great advantage for your energy portfolio.

A key component of tariff rate analysis is tariff modeling. Cursory review of your existing tariff rate can certainly be of value. However, accurate, up-to-date modeling provides the most predictive analysis. Hence, a strategic component of a Legacy Energy tariff analysis is the use of our custom-designed tariff models. By recreating your energy usage profile within our utility-specific models, we can easily experiment with a variety of tariffs to determine which rate structure is the most cost effective choice for your needs.

While not an everyday occurrence, a contract or billing dispute with a utility or supplier only has to happen to you once for you to fully appreciate the expert assistance Legacy Energy offers in this area. From deposit recovery to application of past due credits to contract renegotiation and modification, allow our diligent staff to free up your time and represent your interests.

Have you ever been mystified by a utility’s vague deposit requirements?

Did you know that most utility’s deposit requirements and payment terms are negotiable?

Have you ever negotiated payment terms with 3rd-party natural gas and electricity suppliers?

Do you take full advantage of your multiple-facility portfolio to best leverage your credit and payment terms with utilities?

You owe it to yourself and to your company to utilize the extensive experience that Legacy Energy provides to you in the area of credit and prepayment negotiations. With years of experience dealing with utilities and suppliers, our ability to anticipate realistic avenues for reducing your financial exposure is extensive. While a great deal of effort is required on the front end, an equally important area of focus is applied to working with utilities and suppliers on your behalf to improve existing credit terms and to arrange for accurate and timely return of existing deposits.

Similarly lacking the spotlight with tariff rate analysis, bill verification is out of the limelight but is an energy management core competency that you must not overlook. Utilizing Legacy Energy’s custom-designed tariff rate models allows us to re-create your utility’s bill structure and perform detailed billing verification of your natural gas and electric bills.

A further degree of bill verification is provided by the Legacy Energy bill payment service. Utilizing the bill payment service allows quick, random sampling of billing history to identify potentially abnormal spikes in demand or price. A sampling that shows a recognizable spike compared to historic usage levels may then be treated with additional scrutiny. This higher degree of analysis can lead to several conclusions, including a faulty utility meter, a faulty billing statement, degraded facility equipment, or it may be determined to be a positive occurrence due to increased facility demand and output.

Legacy Energy’s energy sales tax research services are targeted for the specialized environments of our manufacturer clients. The energy management team at Legacy Energy has assisted our clients throughout the United States in researching and capitalizing on manufacturer-specific energy state tax regulations. As is the case in all areas of the tax code, regulations regarding energy taxation vary in each state and must be reviewed in context against each facility’s operations and manufacturing processes.

Energy sales tax research can be a significant area for reduction of an organizations cost of energy via sales tax rebates and exemptions. In concert with your accounting and legal department, we will work with you to ensure that your firm is fairly and accurately being taxed on the state level for all of your manufacturing energy consumption.