Cost Savings Audits vs. Cost Avoidance Audits 

Cost savings and cost avoidance are two different concepts. Cost savings/energy savings are what you see when you compare historic utility bills to new utility bills. However, costs savings/energy savings are not always fair measurements of how much energy you saved because the weather from year to year varies. It would be much easier to show energy savings if you could somehow remove weather from the equation. Cost avoidance calculations normalize weather differences over time and provide a more accurate basis from which to compare historical energy data. The cost avoidance approach compares a baseline which represents how much energy would have been used, to the current year’s bill. There are benefits to both approaches. 

Pierce and Associates will assist you in determining which energy audit best meets your needs.  If you are merely tracking utility usage for hundreds of meters, and you are not interested in determining actual savings (you just want to know how much you used and spent), we may recommend the costs savings approach. If you are tracking usage but want to see if your energy conservation projects are really saving what you expected, we may recommend the cost avoidance approach which involves utility bill analysis and the use of weather normalization equations.