FAQ
About Energy Points
What are EnergyPoints?
The EnergyPoint™ is a unifying metric for measuring energy related resources and environmental performance– empowering business executives to make smart decisions with ease.
The EnergyPoint platform converts all environmental resource domains (including heating oil, electricity, water, transportation, etc.) into a single common unit of fossil fuel. One Energy Point is similar to barrels of oil equivalent but measured in units of gallons of gasoline. Thus, an Energy Point is 1/42 Barrels of Oil Equivalent which is also 42.2kWh. This calibration makes EP accurate since everything can be measured at the primary energy level and simple since a user can think in gallons of gasoline.
What are the key benefits of using the EnergyPoints platform?
Energy Points provides executives a simple, accurate, actionable approach to measure and manage energy resource consumption and savings to efficiently run the enterprise and easily evaluate energy resource saving initiatives for best financial and environmental impact.
Energy Points enables businesses to make smarter business decisions around energy resource initiatives and projects. The EnergyPoints platform can compare the environmental and financial ROI across all types of projects (including electricity, water, transportation, etc) and across multiple locations.
As a result, businesses can now compare, for a given cost, different types of projects (e.g., water efficiency, electricity saving, solar installation, fleet efficiency, etc.) on one normalized scale, providing a true look at which project will benefit the company most.
Who founded Energy Points?
The Company was founded by a team of experienced executives, with rich backgrounds in both start-ups & large corporations. Founding members include:
Dr. Ory Zik, Founder and CEO. Dr. Zik, with a PhD in Physics, founded and was the CEO of several successful startup companies, including Quantomix and Heliofocus, where he currently serves on the board. He also founded the Israeli branch of Greenpeace and holds worldwide patents.
Roy Stein, Co-Founder and COO. Roy was formerly the EVP Operations of Gridpoint; prior to that he was VP Operations of Comverse Billing Systems and VP Corporate Development of Comverse Technologies.
Why was Energy Points created?
Dr. Ory Zik realized the need for a universal measure while he was CEO at HelioFocus. He knew that solar power was clean. Yet he kept asking himself how we can understand it both intuitively and quantitatively without resorting to complex calculations every time we have a question.
He struggled with the fact that when you decide to take on a renewable energy project you need to make investments based on many assumptions that in most cases are very difficult to validate. Additionally, there is no easy way to evaluate cost-benefit tradeoffs or return on these investments. Especially given that many projects deal with many resource types and take a great deal of time to reach operationalization.
Energy Points was created to resolve this problem and provide executives with a unifying metric for measuring environmental sustainability – supporting intuitive, fact-based decisions concerning which projects will provide greatest impact for the enterprise.
How does Energy Points tie into the bottom line?
Energy Points affects the bottom line in four ways:
- For a given expenditure, Energy Points quantifies the relative benefit of multiple projects and enables a company to gain the maximum financial and environmental benefit.
- For a given investment in reducing your company’s energy and environmental footprint (CO2 emissions, energy use, electricity use, water use, waste generated, etc.), Energy Points will compare the projects using a single metric and identify the lowest-cost, highest ROI and shortest payback investment for a set level of energy resource efficiency and environmental benefits.
- By improving enterprise energy resource and environmental performance (for example, investing in water where it makes most sense from the sustainability standpoint), companies reduce/mitigate the risks of facing resource scarcity and abrupt cost elevation.
- Today stakeholders and especially customers are rewarding companies for better environmental responsibility. Energy Points enables companies to communicate their performance in a comprehensive way, enhancing the enterprises brand within its market.
Technology
How does the EnergyPoints platform work?
The EnergyPoints™ platform is designed to manage enterprise energy resource and environmental performance. The technology is based advanced mathematical algorithms, combined with Big Data to convert resource consumption such as water, electricity, transportation, materials and waste into a single energy metric.
The accurate conversion of all resources to energy is based on calculating the exact efficiency in each specific location and time – analogous to a car mpg. This is coupled with life cycle assessment information. For example electricity efficiency is based on the actual electricity mix behind every plug. Water is calculated using the energy invested in water adjusted for local scarcity. Material is based on the life cycle impact.
The EnergyPoints™ platform includes a turn-key customer data acquisition system that allows users to upload historical consumption information with ease and also have APIs that allow customers to easily input new data on an ongoing basis.
How does Energy Points validate its system and databases?
The EnergyPoints platform, based on years of scientific study, draws on cross-correlated databases. Most data points in the company’s 1.8 billion entries database has more than one source. From the beginning, the company has been collaborating with leading faculty and researchers at Boston University, Harvard and MIT.
Why did you choose the gallon of gasoline as your unit of measurement?
The gallon of gasoline is the most familiar energy related unit in the United States – with a well-known cost. MPG is the most familiar energy efficiency factor.
We believe that in todays’ location-based, data driven world, it makes more sense to take what people already feel comfortable with (gallons, mpg) and build a technology that ensures that all resources are calculated correctly using big data and mathematics than the current state of the art of attempting to train busy executives to think in mmBTUs, kWh and tons of CO2.
How does Energy Points address Water and Waste?
Energy Points analyzes the amount of energy needed to “generate” the water and provide it to the tap. How much energy is needed to desalinate, pump ground water, and pump water up to elevated locations, etc.? If you think about it, water is really just an energy problem, but the amount of energy invested in water depends on the location and time of consumption. Most places on earth have access to water; they just don’t all have access to fresh water. Converting sea water or brackish water to potable water is basically an energy problem. Energy Points rates the amount of energy required to deliver water sustainably taking into account the local and temporal conditions. Waste is handled in a similar way; Energy Points calculates the embodied energy of the waste based on its composition, factoring in the actual end of life treatment and state of the art life cycle assessment databases.
Industry Overview/Current Sustainability Practices
What about compliance? Doesn’t that use a universal metric ?
Current protocols do not account for location and time and consumption and do not rigorously account for resources such as water and waste. Our system is simpler and more accurate enabling easy management. For compliance we enable users to report GHG emission automatically from within our portal.
Our environmental accounting is analogous to financial accounting. We simply take the resources that companies pay for and adjust for market imperfections by calculating their true primary energy value.
Our methodology is different from GHG emissions scopes. We rate the resources that companies consume by converting the things that they actually measure (water, electricity, fuel, waste) to the primary energy that went into providing those resources. We make adjustments to make sure that resources are harvested sustainably and with a relatively small energy expense.
You can think of it as an Energy Point budget. You control your energy budget (in Energy Points) the same way you control your financial budgets. The financial and sustainability health of your water, electricity, fuel, and waste is measured in Energy Points and is part of your supplier selection.
Energy Points is an intuitive system that provides one answer. Unlike calculating Carbon Footprint, the EnergyPoints platform is intuitive and takes into account: (1) the location of the resource use, (2) how it was generated (electricity generated from coal has a different rating than that generated from hydroelectric or nuclear), and (3) the sustainability of that source in the specific geographic location. The result is a set of accurate, yet easy-to-understand, non-disparate answers.
What major geographies are covered by Energy Points?
While the EnergyPoints platform can be used by multinational enterprises, the company is currently focused on the countries shown in blue on the attached map. Because of the detailed, location-specific nature of the data required to accurately calculate Energy Points, some countries or areas (that do not gather such information or do not have publicly available data) are not well suited for the Energy Points calculation engine to work at its full potential.
Whom should I contact to get started with Energy Points?
To get started with the EnergyPoints platform, please go to the “Contact Us” page on our web site and fill in the form.