Throughout the academic year, educational institutions should regularly review and update their energy plan. Through energy planning, an educational institution can see how it buys, uses, and reduces energy across its locations. From there, an institution finds ways to cut costs and improve reliability.
In this blog, we will walk through the steps to be taken for educational institutions and how UGI Energy Services (UGIES) assists with energy planning.
Energy Planning for Educational Institutions
The education sector accounts for roughly 13%¹ of total energy consumption in commercial buildings, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s most recent Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey; K-12 public school districts alone spend over $8 billion² on energy costs nationwide each year. With billions of dollars spent on energy in a single year, energy planning becomes that much more important.
Energy is one of the largest controllable expenses for districts and campuses, yet more than 30%³ of it goes to waste. Even with implementing low-cost measures, energy use can be reduced by 10%⁴, allowing for the reallocation of funds to educational resources rather than the utility bill.
While energy planning can free up funds, upgrades resulting from the energy plan, such as lighting or HVAC systems, can provide greater comfort for students and faculty.
What Does This Look Like?
1. Understand Where You Stand
Before any planning takes place, it’s important to know where your current energy systems are working and where they’re not. An energy audit outlines usage within all facilities. It starts with a detailed walk-through of each facility within the district or campus to spot obvious waste (i.e., unmonitored lights in empty rooms, drafty windows and doors, blocked vents). Next, the utility bill and metering data for the past 1 to 3 years should be pulled, so a baseline for how much energy you use, building by building, month by month, can be identified.
This baseline becomes useful when compared to similar facilities—tools like Energy Star’s Portfolio Manager allow districts to benchmark their buildings against thousands of comparable schools nationwide making it clear whether a building’s energy usage is average, high, or low. The goal is to end with findings like, “Building A uses 40% more electricity per square foot than Building B, mostly due to the outdated HVAC.”
2. Set Clear Goals
Once an energy audit has been conducted, the school can set clear, measurable goals based on what the audit revealed. Strong goals combine several key elements:
- A metric answers “what exactly is being measured?’ such as cost, consumption (kWh, BTUs), emissions (metric tons of CO2), or energy use intensity (kWh per square foot).
- A target number gives the goal a measurable finish line, such as “reduce electricity by 15%.”
- A deadline sets the timeline, for example, Building A reducing electricity use by 40% over 5 years, broken down into 8% reductions each year.
- Scope defines the proximity in which this goal will be implemented, whether building-specific or district-wide.
- A baseline year, such as FY2026, gives the goal a fixed starting point for comparison.
3. Choose Your Efficiency Measures
At this stage, you can begin exploring the solutions for each problem identified and mapped in the initial steps. For example, if the identified problem was lighting in 80% of the classrooms, the solution might be an LED retrofit.
Choosing your efficiency measures can include low- or no-cost solutions as well as moderate or major ones. Despite how it may sound, the low-to-no-cost solutions can help you save significantly; simple actions like recalibrating thermostat schedules to match school hours, sealing air leaks around doors and windows, and retraining staff on proper equipment shutdown procedures pay for themselves over time. Moderate investments might include smart thermostats or occupancy-based lighting controls, while major investments such as HVAC system replacements or building envelope upgrades require more capital but deliver the largest long-term savings. Separate from these tiers, renewable energy may be explored during this time, shifting the focus to how energy needs are met rather than directly reducing energy waste.
Typically, each measure is tiered by its payoff period, so quick wins come first, freeing up resources for more costly measures. Beyond cost savings, these upgrades have a direct impact on student focus and learning.
4. Budget and Procure Energy Wisely
This next step sets everything in reality, asking how these goals will actually be paid for. Funding can come from a variety of places including reallocated savings from earlier low-cost measures, grants, utility rebates, or state and federal incentives. This is also where energy procurement comes into play: renegotiating contracts or exploring new pricing structures for better rates while upgrades are in progress.
For education institutions in deregulated markets, this would be the time to work with a supplier like UGIES, creating customized contracts, from fixed-rate agreements to indexed or hedged pricing, that stabilize costs while having the flexibility for your energy plan to evolve.
5. Get Staff, Faculty, and Students on Board
Even with upgrades complete, human behavior like leaving the lights on, windows open, or the computer on can affect the impact of your upgrades. Getting staff, faculty, and students on board means running efforts alongside the technical implementations, such as awareness campaigns, policies, and training staff on new systems like smart thermostats or building automation. When efforts are framed with a shared goal(s) like sustainability on campus, many more are likely to participate.
6. Implement in Phases
Implementation is where your plan starts to play out, but it’s almost never all at once. A typical rollout might look like:
- Year 1 focusing on quick wins like lighting retrofits and staff training
- Years 2-3 tackling larger infrastructure projects like HVAC upgrades and building automation
- Years 4-5 designated for larger, long-term investments like solar installations or major renovations
Timelines can shift during implementation due to factors like construction delays or budget changes, which is why it’s important to track progress throughout the process.
7. Monitor, Report, and Adjust
Monitoring is what turns energy planning from a one-time project to an ongoing plan. This means comparing new utility and metering data against the original baseline, checking progress against the specific goals set, and re-benchmarking through tools like Energy Star Portfolio Manager to see if performance has improved.
If a measure isn’t delivering as expected (e.g., a smart thermostat is underperforming), this is the stage where that gets caught and adjusted. During this stage, educational institutions report results to the school board or community to support future funding requests and transparency. From here, the results become the new baseline, and the process begins again.
What Can UGIES Provide?
Energy planning is a tedious process, so it’s important to make things easier where possible. On the financial side, a supplier like UGIES can help. We work directly with facility managers and procurement teams to design customized energy plans, offering competitive pricing structures, transparent contract terms, and ongoing market guidance.
Educational institutions’ energy needs are rarely static, with peak demand periods during the school year, new infrastructure projects, and shifting enrollment, all of which require an energy partner that can adapt like UGIES, which is something a standard utility contract can’t provide.
We are committed to ensuring our education customers find the best energy-buying strategies, so please check out our free Educational Organization’s Energy Guide.
Questions? Contact the energy experts at UGIES today for energy solutions for your school, college, or university.
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