Proof That Monitoring Works: What Changed When This Campus Watched the Numbers

How about some GOOD news for a change? 

Take a look at these two charts, which illustrate one campus’s success at lowering their energy usage and creating substantial savings through energy monitoring.

The top chart, in orange, shows the change in campus square footage from 2019 to 2025. You can see the drop in space usage in 2022 (due to Covid) and the jump in square footage in 2025, as new buildings came online and the student population rose.

The lower chart, in blue, shows the campus’s energy utilization index (or “EUI”) over the same time period. Despite the increase in the area needed to be served with utilities, the EUI of the campus actually went DOWN, even though many of the new spaces were more energy-intensive, like labs.

For funsies, let’s look at one more chart:

With Monitoring vs. Without

We’ve worked with this campus since 2011, so we have a solid baseline for how its buildings behave in different weather and at different occupancy rates. The blue line in the chart above shows that baseline – the expected utility consumption of the buildings given the weather and occupancy that year. The orange bars show the actual electricity consumption. Year after year, monitoring energy usage at the plant has paid off in lower consumption and fewer carbon emissions, again despite growth in square footage and occupancy.