Aaron

GRITS 10th Anniversary Celebration

Dear GRITS Community,

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the launch of GRITS. Way back on Earth Day in 2014 we unveiled the initial version of GRITS as a new solution to help sustainability and energy teams accelerate their institution’s work towards greater energy efficiency and decarbonization goals.

It has been an incredible journey building out the platform’s functionality and growing the community of GRITS users. The guidance, encouragement and support we’ve received from this community have been absolutely essential in making the journey a success, and GRITS definitely wouldn’t exist without all of you. Did you know that nearly 90% of the functionality that users rely on today didn’t yet exist in GRITS 1.0 when we launched the platform a decade ago? The vast majority of new features were added because of input from both current and prospective users and through fun feedback competitions like the GRITS Gold Medal Challenge we ran to coincide with the 2022 Olympic Games.

Below you’ll find a timeline that spotlights a small selection of our milestones over the years.

We want to take a moment to specifically thank many of our original users who are still tracking their work in GRITS 10 years later: Boston University, Colgate University, Dickinson College, Lane Community College, Luther College, Spelman College, the State of Vermont, Thompson Rivers University, University of Michigan, University of New Hampshire, University of Vermont, Western Michigan University and Williams College.

We’re also grateful for the terrific partner organizations within the GRITS community—APPA, NYSERDA, Second Nature, SIMAP and USDN—that have allowed GRITS to reach a much wider range of institutions.

As we celebrate this milestone, we also want to recognize and deeply thank all of the current and past team members who have worked on GRITS over the past decade. Developing and managing GRITS is a huge effort and we are fortunate to have a world-class team that cares deeply about making an impact in the fight against climate change.

To help celebrate this 10th anniversary year we have many exciting new features planned, so look for announcements about these features in the coming months. And please keep the feedback and suggestions for improvement coming, as we’re always interested in hearing from our current and prospective users. (You can check out feedback that we've collected from GRITS users for the 10th anniversary celebration here.)

Thank you so much for being part of the GRITS community. We look forward to continuing to work together to help you reach your institution’s energy, sustainability and decarbonization goals!

Onward!

Mark, Aaron, Arvel, Deb and the whole GRITS Team

by Aaron

Using GRITS to Manage a Green Revolving Fund

GRITS is the only platform designed to help institutions track both the project investments and repayments involved when running a green revolving fund (GRF).

While most GRITS users don't finance their sustainability projects through a GRF, those who do have additional features designed specifically to simplify the accounting required.

Easily keep track of fund balances, investments, and financial savings

There are a number of figures that a GRF manager must keep track of: the total fund value, the balance available to be invested in new projects, and the outstanding amount currently invested in completed projects that are in their payback phase. GRITS helps you keep track of all three figures.

You can set your total fund value and adjust it whenever it grows (due to donations or other sources) or shrinks (if the fund was itself seeded with a loan requiring repayment, for example). You can find more information about fund-level transactions below.

Each project-level transaction you enter, whether an expenditure, repayment, or even a rebate, will automatically recalculate the available balance and outstanding loan amounts for your fund.

GRITS also calculates two projections for you: 1) the fund balance as of today if all project loan repayments were made daily, and 2) the fund balance at the end of the fiscal year, with all anticipated loan repayments factored in. These projections can help you plan for your next round of project investments.

Lastly, you'll see a tally of the amount of money invested in projects to date as well as the cumulative financial savings achieved by those projects to date.

See all GRF cash flows in one place

You can enter transactions at the fund level and at the level of individual projects. All of those transactions are organized in one place, so that you can easily keep track of all cash flows associated with your GRF.

Learn more about establishing your total fund value and other fund-level transactions here.

Learn more about project-related transactions here.

Set your GRF repayment guidelines, and GRITS will calculate the payback schedule for every project

GRITS allows you to specify the percentage of savings you'll repay to your GRF for each repayment period. If you plan to grow your GRF over time, you can also indicate which strategy you're using: charging an interest rate on the outstanding project loan, planning to pay back extra savings based on the project cost (say, 110% of the cost rather than 100%), or continuing to pay back a certain percentage of savings (say 20%) for a period of time after the project cost has been repaid. These repayment guidelines allow GRITS to calculate a payback schedule for each of your projects.

If you grow your GRF over time by charging an interest rate or by planning to pay back an extra percentage of the project cost, you can customize those rates for individual projects.

Each of your projects has an "Annual Tracking Data" table that displays both the projected financial savings for each fiscal year of the project's lifespan and the payback schedule you should follow to adhere to your GRF's repayment guidelines. All mechanisms used to grow the fund are factored into these calculations, as well as any updates made to resource prices or unit savings in any fiscal year.

Ultimately, you can customize the project loan repayment transactions you enter to match your actual cash flows, even if they differ from the schedule provided by GRITS. If you perform multiple repayments each year or you decide to repay a different portion of a project's accrued savings, you can indicate that. Based on these transactions, GRITS keeps track of the outstanding loan balance for each project.

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In addition to these GRF accounting features, GRITS provides much more functionality designed to support your efforts to reduce emissions and resource consumption. The platform calculates a host of project-level and portfolio-wide impact metrics (see which metrics GRITS calculates for you!) and offers several ways to communicate those impacts with others (see all the sharing options GRITS provides!).

If you're looking for additional GRF resources, you can check out our survey of institutions across the United States with a GRF. It discusses common fund operating procedures, explores their benefits, and addresses commonly perceived barriers to getting started--including a section on GRF accounting. An appendix lists additional resources for learning more about GRFs and ways to establish one within your institution.

Interested in learning more about GRITS? Contact us!

by Aaron

Learn from, Connect with, and Inspire Others through the GRITS Project Library

The GRITS Project Library is a unique resource that currently features over 4,500 completed projects from GRITS users around the world. You won't find a richer source of real-world energy efficiency and renewable energy project data elsewhere.

Non-profit institutions that choose to participate in the GRITS Library can see these projects and contribute their own. What can you do with access to the Library?

Compare your project data against others'

Maybe you've recently completed an HVAC project and want to understand how it compares to HVAC projects in other places but within the same kind of building (office, classroom, etc.). You might be curious whether you're paying an appropriate price for a multi-building lighting retrofit. Perhaps you want to know whether nearby institutions have received a rebate for their lighting upgrades.

All of this information is available in the GRITS Project Library. You'll also be able to review the documentation that other GRITS users have attached to their projects and decided to share (e.g. requests for proposals, project blueprints, before and after photos).

See what peer institutions are working on

If you have one or more peer institutions that tend to influence your work or whose actions motivate project decision-makers at your institution, you can follow them in the Library. Filter for projects from a specific institution or a particular geographic location.

Get inspiration for new projects

Institutions around the world are constantly working to reduce resource consumption and carbon emissions in their facilities. They might be working with equipment or materials or in a particular type of building that you haven't explored during your own efforts. Have you wondered how much energy a new boiler could save? Check out the Library!

Those with access to the GRITS Library receive the Library Digest, a biweekly email that displays the latest projects completed by GRITS users. Get project inspiration delivered to your inbox!

(Note: The Project Profile widgets that appear in the Library Digest email, like the example pictured below, are available for each of your own projects. They can be embedded in your institution's website or downloaded for social media sharing.)

Connect with your peers via GRITS Connect

Once you've found an interesting project that you'd like to know more about, you can use the "GRITS Connect" feature to reach out to the user who added it. GRITS will send a connection request to that user, and if they accept, the platform will send an email introduction to both of you.

Share your work with others

Another benefit of participating in the GRITS Library is that you can contribute to a unique learning resource used by other sustainability and facilities professionals around the world. Boost the impact of your work by sharing your project insights with thousands of other GRITS users. And raise the profile of your institution and its resource use reduction efforts in the process!

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Not a GRITS user? Check out the GRITS Public Library

If your institution doesn't have a GRITS account, you can get a taste of the full Project Library by exploring the GRITS Public Library here: https://app.gogrits.org/library/public

The Public Library features a selection of projects from the full Library that users have chosen to share with the world.

To recap, the GRITS Project Library allows you to:

• Compare your project data against others' (what you're saving, how much you're paying, relevant rebate opportunities, publicly available documentation, etc.)
• See what peer institutions are working on
• Get inspiration for new projects
• Connect with others via GRITS Connect
• Share your work with others (See all the sharing options GRITS provides!)

by Aaron

Getting Out of Spreadsheets with GRITS

For those whose job involves planning or installing projects that reduce resource consumption or carbon emissions, spreadsheets are a commonly used tool for organizing the data involved. They're certainly better than written notes or documents, or not tracking project-related data at all. But they pose a number of challenges that can drain your time (and patience). Using GRITS to track your project data and your resource use reduction targets helps you leave spreadsheets behind.

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Project-level and portfolio-wide impact metrics calculated with minimal data entry

Spreadsheets: Initially setting up a spreadsheet to calculate project impacts takes a lot of work. Just informing oneself about meaningful metrics to track takes time. More time is needed if additional datasets are required to perform a calculation, like finding emissions factors in order to determine the carbon savings from your energy efficiency projects. And learning how to set up special equations in the formats required by the spreadsheet can feel like learning a foreign language.

GRITS: Numerous meaningful project impact metrics are built into the platform and calculated from a handful of details about each project. Easily track the energy, financial, and carbon savings of individual projects and your whole portfolio. Learn more about the metrics GRITS calculates for you!

Easy-to-use interface & numerous forms of live and self-guided user support

Spreadsheets: Once a spreadsheet is set up, it may not be intuitive to others. Teaching colleagues how to use it can take significant time.

GRITS: GRITS's intuitive and standardized interface facilitates collaboration between different departments (even those not well-versed in facilities work). Access to your online account can be provided to an unlimited number of people.

Numerous support options make it easy to get started with GRITS, including direct calls and emails with support staff, a live chat feature in the platform, numerous self-paced in-app tours, recorded walkthroughs, and a comprehensive GRITS Guide. A live GRITS walkthrough takes an hour or less, and a project can be created in a couple minutes.

Protection against corrupted files, with editor or read-only access levels for each user & a central location for all of your project data

Spreadsheets: Keeping track of hundreds of projects across dozens of buildings isn't always easy. If different spreadsheets are used to capture different kinds of data, compiling everything can be time-consuming. The potential for data entry mistakes only increases with the number of projects and spreadsheet collaborators. The worst-case scenario is when a file that hasn't been backed up becomes corrupted and unusable after lots of effort has been put into it.

GRITS: Tracking project data with GRITS eliminates the risk of corrupted files and can reduce data mistakes. Each password-protected user log-in can be specified with either editor or viewer (read-only) access, so that only those who should be able to add and edit project data are able to do so.

With GRITS, all of your project data lives in one central location. This includes a cash flow table that aggregates each project-level expenditure or rebate you enter, which becomes extra useful if your institution finances projects through a green revolving fund. You can upload all documentation relevant to each project, including requests for proposals, signed contracts, project blueprints, and before and after photos.

Several data sharing features to communicate the impacts of your projects and comply with reporting requirements

Spreadsheets: Sharing the insights contained in a spreadsheet with decision-makers who aren't familiar with it requires its own learning curve. Even after data has been collected and project impact metrics are getting calculated, you still need to figure out how to build charts and other visuals from your data. Spreadsheets don't allow for dynamic or interactive charts, limiting the options you have to illustrate your work.

GRITS: GRITS has several sharing features that make it easy to communicate the impacts of your projects with others and facilitate compliance with reporting requirements. Generate charts of your project impacts or embed interactive dashboards into your institution's websites. See all the sharing options GRITS provides!

Easier staff transitions

Spreadsheets: When all of your institution's project data lives in a spreadsheet, staff transitions can get messy. Departing staff need to set aside time to teach new hires about how the sheet works. If that knowledge transfer doesn't happen, it can sideline an institution's ability to keep track of its projects.

GRITS: GRITS eases staff transitions with its intuitive interface, short learning curve, and support professionals available to provide training and assist new users with any questions they have.

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GRITS has many advantages over spreadsheets. It's likely to save you and your team a lot of time and frustration. It offers even more advantages if your institution hasn't been keeping track of its project data at all. By entering this data into GRITS you'll get a better understanding of your projects' impacts, which can help justify the important benefits that project planners and installers (facilities staff, energy managers, etc.) bring to your institution.

by Aaron

Using GRITS to Analyze the Impacts of Your Projects

One of the major ways GRITS can support your work is by helping you understand the energy, financial, and carbon savings of your sustainability projects. Perhaps your institution has never consistently tracked the impacts of your projects. Or maybe you're keeping track of some project details in a spreadsheet, but lacking many of the metrics you'd like to know. That's where GRITS can make a big difference.

The platform generates and presents three kinds of impact data: project-level, portfolio-wide, and illustrated reports.

Project-level

Each project you enter has its own impact calculations--check it out.

GRITS calculates each project's financial, energy, carbon emissions, water, and waste savings, breaking them out into three categories: median annual savings, total to date savings, and lifetime savings (over the course of the new equipment's lifespan).

GRITS also calculates a number of financial metrics that allow you to evaluate the project's effectiveness as an investment. These include the payback period, annual and lifetime return on investment (ROI), net present value (NPV), internal rate of return (IRR), and unit cost per MTCO₂e abated.

And to get all of these calculations, you only need to enter a handful of data points for a project (or use our spreadsheet upload option to add multiple projects at the same time).

You can also easily customize these calculations in several ways:

• You're able to update the price of a saved resource or the actual amount saved (e.g. if utility meters are in place) in any fiscal year, and when you do, all of these calculations update automatically.
• Does your institution use different electricity emissions factors than others in your area? GRITS lets you customize your emissions factors for electricity and a number of other resources to ensure your carbon emissions savings calculations are accurate.
• Does your institution apply a social cost of carbon (SCC) or carbon price to your emissions? If so, you can enter your SCC framework into GRITS and have the platform calculate the "carbon reduction impact" (i.e. the avoided damages in dollar terms resulting from reduced emissions) for each project. You can even formally incorporate the carbon reduction impact into your projects' financial savings.
• GRITS also allows you to apply resource price forecasts to your projects to see how your financial savings would increase if utility prices rise.

Portfolio-wide

GRITS aggregates your project data, allowing you to evaluate your entire portfolio or just a specific piece of it. Most of these metrics match those calculated for each individual project (e.g. median annual/to-date/lifetime savings across avoided costs/energy/emissions/water/waste).

You can dive further into your data through numerous filters. Only want to see the impacts of your completed projects? Or perhaps you're currently interested in the anticipated impacts of proposed projects. Filter by project type (e.g. lighting, HVAC, renewable energy, etc.), campus/site, facility, cost, and many more options--even create your own custom filter.

Illustrated reports

Some project impacts are better understood through charts and graphs than numbers alone. That's where the Reports tab in GRITS comes in.

Chart the financial, energy, emissions, water, and waste savings of your projects in seconds. View the impacts of single projects or of all your completed projects.

See your savings over time broken down according to the buildings where your projects took place, the campus/site where they took place, the custom filters ("tags") you've created, or by project type.

You can also use those same categories (by facility, by campus/site, by tag, or by project type) to generate charts showing savings to date.

The benefits of understanding your project impacts

• Push for greater investment in sustainability projects with a business case analysis that financial decision-makers understand.
• Share the impacts of your institution's projects with decision-makers and/or the public. See all the sharing options GRITS provides!
• More easily report on your institution's efforts to reduce carbon emissions or energy use.
• Strengthen your institution's fundraising appeals by incorporating these impact metrics.
• Gain the context you need to evaluate project proposals from contractors.
• Justify the important benefits that project planners and installers (facilities staff, energy managers, etc.) bring to your institution.

by Aaron

A Rundown of GRITS Sharing Features

GRITS offers numerous features for sharing your project-level, portfolio-wide, and sustainability action plan data. With so many ways the platform can help you communicate the impacts of your work, we thought it could be helpful to put together a list!

Project-level sharing features

1) Project-level PDFs: Export all of the details associated with each project into an easy-to-read PDF format in one click. Build a report from these PDFs to share with others.

2) Project Profiles: The Profile is a widget that displays your project’s name, description (up to around 120 characters), lifetime energy/carbon/water/waste/financial savings and return on investment, any publicly visible cover photo that you’ve chosen, and your institution’s logo (if available). It’s a great option for publicly highlighting your project’s impact in a more compact format than the project-level webpage. You can either embed this widget in a website (it will update automatically whenever your project data changes) or download these images as PNG files for social media posts.

3) Project-level read-only webpages: Looking just like the project-level PDF, this option allows you to share a link to a read-only webpage that displays all of your project’s details. This webpage will update automatically whenever your project data changes and can be viewed by anyone, even if they don’t have access to GRITS. You can easily revoke access later by disabling the link.

Portfolio-wide data sharing features

4) Customizable Public Dashboard: Choose between four and eight metrics that aggregate data across your project portfolio and select your preferred layout, and GRITS will generate a Public Dashboard that you can embed into a website to highlight the impacts of your projects. This dashboard will update automatically whenever your project data changes.

5) Reports tab charts: Quickly generate charts that illustrate the carbon, energy, financial, waste, and water savings achieved by your projects. All charts can be downloaded as PNG files or exported to PDF for inclusion in reports or websites.

Sustainability action plan sharing features

6) Scenario chart: You can use GRITS to design pathways for achieving your institution’s climate action plan or complying with state or local targets for building efficiency. Quickly generate a chart that illustrates the anticipated carbon, energy, waste, and water reductions achieved by your sustainability action plan model (“scenario”). Download a PNG file for inclusion in reports or social media sharing.

7) Scenario-level read-only webpages: This option allows you to share a link to a read-only webpage that displays all of the details of your scenario. This webpage will update automatically whenever your scenario data changes and can be viewed by anyone, even if they don’t have access to GRITS. You can easily revoke access later by disabling the link.

8) Customizable and interactive Scenario Dashboards: Choose which sections of your scenario page that you’d like to display (even down to the specific metrics from each section), and GRITS will generate a dashboard that you can embed into a website to highlight the impacts of your scenario. This dashboard will update automatically whenever your scenario data changes.

9) In addition to the various sharing options above, you can also download spreadsheets containing all of your project and goal scenario data. This allows you to go even further beyond the calculations performed by GRITS and work with your data any way you like.

by Aaron

Greening the Bottom Line 2023

The Sustainable Endowments Institute (SEI) is releasing a new report today—Greening the Bottom Line: Advancing Institutional Sustainability Goals with Green Revolving Funds (GRFs). GRFs are an internal financing tool dedicated to investing in projects that reduce an institution’s carbon emissions, energy consumption, water use and/or waste production, and revolving the ensuing utility cost savings to fund future projects.

Universities, K-12 schools, and local/state governments are all using the innovative GRF model to help decarbonize their campuses and communities. This report tracks the latest trends and highlights best practices to enable more institutions and communities to learn about and adopt this funding model. The result of surveying 66 institutions, this report examines how GRFs are established and managed, discusses the benefits they provide, and addresses perceived barriers to creating one.

Key findings include: 

• Cumulative project investment provided by these GRFs is over $1.3 billion.

• Projects financed by the GRFs in this survey tend to achieve a 17 percent return on investment (ROI) and have a payback period of five years.

• Nearly 2,200 projects that reduce resource consumption have been financed by the GRFs in the survey.

• Asked whether their GRF had changed how much they are able to get done, over 90 percent of respondents said that having a GRF allows their institution to finance more sustainability projects.

Since 2010, SEI has been developing resources to support institutions that are considering or in the process of establishing a GRF, including implementation guides, case studies, and trend reports like the current one.

“Revolving funds present an exciting win-win-win opportunity to lower operating costs, reduce resource use, and improve the quality of an institution’s facilities all at the same time. They are a very flexible mechanism used by very small organizations to large state governments,” said Mark Orlowski, Founder and Executive Director of the Sustainable Endowments Institute.

Two institutions shared how GRFs assist in meeting carbon neutrality goals:

"Establishing a revolving energy fund at the University of Michigan has strengthened our energy conservation work across all university facilities. This is an important, early component of our pursuit of achieving carbon neutrality," said Kevin Morgan, Regional Energy Manager at the University of Michigan.

Trevor Ledbetter, Director of the University of Arizona Office of Sustainability, said, “Our Utility Modification Revolving Fund has provided a valuable case study of how investing in energy efficiency can be leveraged to provide ongoing financial resources for improvements that support our climate neutrality goals. Based upon the success we have seen in only two years, we are now actively investigating how additional seed funding sources can grow our fund to further accelerate our efforts.”

The report is available for free online at www.RevolvingFunds.org

by Aaron

Celebrating GRITS' 9th Anniversary!

This week we're celebrating the 9th anniversary of the original release of GRITS 1.0. A lot has changed in the past nine years! We launched GRITS from our office in downtown Boston and over the years have added thousands of new users and welcomed hundreds of new institutions on board. We're always seeking feedback from our users and partners and constantly building new and expanded functionality into GRITS. In fact, we estimate that on our 9th anniversary GRITS has about 9x the number of capabilities that it had in the original version in 2014.

Throughout this time, we have also maintained nearly all of our original GRITS team members, who continue to design new features and lead the platform's growth into new countries and new sectors. Some of the major features we’ve added to GRITS include:

• Library Digest emails with new projects from other users
• Social cost of carbon frameworks that estimate additional financial benefits of reducing carbon emissions
• GRITS Goals climate action planning features
• Public Dashboards: embed project-level, portfolio-level, or goal scenario data in websites
• Customizable carbon emissions factors
• GRITS Library (with over 4,000 completed projects to learn from)
• Reports tab that illustrates project data in charts and graphs

As the number of GRITS users has expanded, we have also started to facilitate connections and create a community through our GRITS User Get Together calls. Participants share the bigger picture behind their sustainability projects–the successes, obstacles, and remaining questions. It’s one more way that the platform helps sustainability and facilities professionals learn from one another. We hope to see you on a future call (sign up here to be notified in advance).

A big thank you to all of our users around the world and to our many partner organizations. GRITS wouldn't be here today, or be the advanced platform it has become, without all of you. We're excited for the years ahead and to celebrate our 10th anniversary next year when GRITS will have taken another leap forward both in terms of a growing community of users and exciting new features that are in the works!

by Aaron