Aaron

Thanks to our new initiative alongside the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star Portfolio Manager program, Portfolio Manager users can access a free version of GRITS and utilize this powerful tool to track and monitor energy efficiency and sustainability at their institution. We recently hosted a webinar to share how existing Portfolio Manager users are benefiting from integrating GRITS into their processes. The presenters included: Daniel Edson, State Energy Program Manager, Department of Buildings & General Services, State of Vermont. Brendan Hall, Public Sector Program Manager, ENERGY STAR Commercial & Industrial Branch at U.S. EPA. Mark Orlowski, Executive Director, Sustainable Endowments Institute, the Boston-based organization that developed GRITS. The webinar highlighted the complementary benefits of the Portfolio Manager tool and the GRITS platform for tracking building-level and project-level data, respectively. It included presentations on both platforms as well as a case study from the State of Vermont as both a Portfolio Manager and GRITS user. You can watch the webinar here or view the comparison chart below that highlights the key features of both platforms.The GRITS tour starts around the 22:45 mark in the recording. And here is the link for Portfolio Manager users to sign up for free access to GRITS.

The Sustainable Endowments Institute has now partnered with NYSERDA’s REV Campus Challenge to provide access to a free version of GRITS for all REV participants. You can review the recent recording of our REV Campus Challenge webinar on GRITS that goes through many aspects of using the platform. Users can immediately access the GRITS Library featuring thousands of completed projects from other institutions. Use the filters to find your peers (including the “REV Campus Challenge” checkbox) and see what they have been working on! Did you know? GRITS is an eligible scope of work activity under the REV Campus Challenge member-exclusive Roadmaps program! Get up to 100% of your costs covered to collect and input GRITS project data and create an SOP to streamline future data management. Contact us at info@gogrits.org. As you may already know, GRITS is a platform for tracking sustainability projects from any funding source—not just those financed with a green revolving fund (GRF). In fact, more than 80% of institutions using GRITS don’t have a GRF. If your institution does use a GRF to finance its sustainability projects, reach out to us and we’ll switch your account to GRF mode to track how project savings flow back into the fund. The GRITS Guide is available to answer most of your questions about the platform.

The launch of GRITS 3.0 brings many new features designed to make GRITS even more customizable—especially through the new tag (custom groups) feature. The Reports tab has been streamlined while adding additional chart options. Keep reading for more details or log into GRITS now to see the upgrades for yourself! Wiki Getting assistance when using GRITS just got easier, as we’ve moved the GRITS Guide into an online wiki, which you can access here. Follow the “Getting Started” portion of the wiki if you’re just starting to use GRITS. You can also use the search bar to find the topics you’d like to explore. As GRITS continues to add new features, this wiki will be regularly updated—no need to wonder if you have the most recent GRITS Guide! Tags Have you ever wanted to create a custom group of projects that can quickly be analyzed on the Projects tab or graphed on the Reports tab? That is now possible through the new tags feature. Create a custom tag to apply to your projects and use the new Tags filter on the Projects tab to isolate a specific group or groups and view the metrics GRITS calculates. On the Reports tab you are now able to select a single tag and create a graph of your custom project group. View this graph in “aggregate” form or choose “stacked” to display the savings contribution of each project individually, and then customize further by deselecting individual projects from the graph legend. Enhanced GRITS user interface We’ve updated GRITS’s infrastructure, and the platform’s interface along with it. One note in particular: table rows that can be expanded now have a green bar that appears when your cursor hovers over them. Bulk tagging and deleting On the Projects tab you are now able to select and modify multiple projects at once with the new bulk selection feature. Use this feature to add a tag to several projects or delete multiple projects simultaneously. New Reports options and layout We have streamlined the Reports tab, making the layout more concise and adding additional graphing options. You can now view savings over time by facility, campus, project type, or tag. Each graph can be viewed as an “aggregate” form (solid bars) or “stacked” form, which splits the bars according to the savings of each individual project. You can also view savings to date across these categories. A new format for graphing single projects displays their project status (Proposed, In-progress, or Completed). This new layout is a precursor to a fully customizable Reports tab that we will be building in the future! Bulk price changes via upload While GRITS allows you to update your resource prices (and the actual amount saved, if measured directly) for each fiscal year on a project-by-project basis, time constraints may have prevented you from making these updates. Now you can update the resource prices for all of your projects at once! Just send that data to us, indicating the resource type and fiscal years that the prices should apply, and we will input them—improving the accuracy of project calculations by adding additional real-world data. Customizable stats Users now have greater control over the metrics that GRITS calculates. In the new “Math, Units, and Stats” sub-tab on the Settings page, you can choose whether GRITS will use median or mean to calculate average values. Median will be the default, because it diminishes the impact of outliers (projects with savings much higher or lower than the rest of your projects). If you choose mean, which is just a simple average, you can also choose whether GRITS will include only relevant projects in your savings calculations (i.e., when calculating average water savings, only projects with water savings will be used to determine the average) or all projects (even those without relevant resource savings).