Life-Cycle Management: Energy Tracking, Budgeting & Bill Checking
Selecting an energy product that is right for you is only the first step in better managing your energy needs. The real challenge is the painstaking process of tracking your energy usage, budgeting your energy spend, and ensuring that you are being properly billed by the supplier or utility. As part of the “managed product,” RPAC provides a full suite of life-cycle management platforms and services to ensure that your account is always monitored and that you have access to relevant reports and analysis.
Entrope (Energy Tracking and Online Planning Exchange)
Entrope,
RPAC’s proprietary web-based technology, takes the guess work out of managing your energy load and is a cornerstone of our service. This system supports our industry-leading management techniques and forecasting capabilities. Our clients receive comprehensive access to these online tools to run detailed, personalized reports, and collect real-time data from relevant markets and hubs around the country.
This tool enables us to:
Customized reports and analysis
Providing timely and accurate reporting in a format that is useful to our clients is one of RPAC’s greatest strength. Our ENTROPE system enables us to gather and manipulate data in a completely flexible and efficient manner.
Entrope allows RPAC staff members and clients direct access to dozens of reports and analysis, which can be customized at the portfolio or individual utility account level.
Historical real-time and day-ahead settlement prices
In organized energy markets, electricity can be bought and sold in regional spot markets setup and managed by the Independent System Operator (ISO) or Regional Transmission Organization (RTO). These spot markets or “Locational Based Marginal Prices” (LBMPs) represent the marginal cost of generating power. Entrope tracks both real-time and day-ahead LBMPs, and RPAC uses this data for a number of its energy management services.
Clients can log into Entrope to check on historical power prices and see the impact on their energy spend and budget.
Historical Performance Reporting
RPAC utilizes its ENTROPE system to report on contract performance. One of the simplest forms of measuring performance is savings versus the utility default rate. RPAC also tracks performance versus comparative product options, such as fixed rate versus index rate products, or index versus RPAC Pool Products.
Development of purchasing and hedging strategies
Understanding the risk/reward profile of a managed product is essential to appropriate management of the inherent risks. RPAC prepares risk analyses for our clients to clearly understand the risk and rewards of various hedging strategies under different assumptions. Our unparalleled experience at managing end-user as well as retail electricity supplier risk enables us to analyze market conditions and make recommendations to remove the appropriate level of volatility commensurate with client objectives.
Documenting performance against the spot market in a managed product is one of the core functions of the Entrope platform. Entrope allows us to input block (hedge) contracts and monitor their performance.
Detailed Budget Reporting and Projections
Development of Managed Product budgets for most consultants and even suppliers is usually a very time consuming and onerous task. Because RPAC has access to hourly LBMP historical data, futures prices and your hourly projected load, we can utilize our ENTROPE system to provide the most accurate and up-to-date budget available. We can also utilize various assumptions around clearing LBMP prices and market movement to create a range of potential outcomes. RPAC works with clients to develop the most useful and accurate budgets to serve its various stakeholders.
Invoice Tracking and Bill Auditing/Checking
Understanding how invoiced power costs differ from budgeted costs is one of the most crucial analyses required for proper energy management. As part of the Managed Product, RPAC performs monthly Invoice Variance Tracking to ensure that clients are being properly billed by 3rd party suppliers.
Auditing Managed Product bills requires the manipulation of literally thousands of data elements on a monthly basis. Without a system like ENTROPE it would take many hours to perform an accurate bill audit. With ENTROPE, RPAC is able to complete this shadow bill calculation in under 10 seconds.
RPAC has caught millions of dollars of errors and generated refunds for our clients with every major retail electricity supplier.
Furthermore, RPAC utilizes the management console of the ENTROPE platform to ensure proper account enrollment and drops, which is essential in ensuring that large portfolios are properly managed and store/facility openings and closings are tracked.