By Jason Charles Guck, Business Development, Delta Edge CI
I sell energy conservation services. What follows is a list of questions designed to make that harder.
That is deliberate. Most energy services agreements are signed by operators who have no practical way to evaluate the claim being made, because the claim is about the future and the evidence arrives a year later. The result is an industry where the quality of the sales conversation and the quality of the delivered work are only loosely related.
Ten questions. Ask them of anyone, including us.
The measurement questions
1. What is the baseline, and who set it?
Every savings claim is a comparison against something. If the baseline is a modelled estimate rather than your own metered history, the savings can be engineered by choosing a flattering assumption. Ask for the baseline in writing, ask which twelve months it covers, and ask whether it is weather-normalised. A baseline drawn from a hot summer makes the following year look like success.
2. Who performs the measurement after the work is done?
If the vendor calculates the savings, the vendor is grading their own work. That is not automatically disqualifying, but it should be visible to you. Ask whether the method follows a recognised protocol, ask to see a worked example from another site, and ask what happens when your numbers and theirs disagree. The mechanics of this are covered in our post on what verified savings actually means.
3. Which parts of the bill does this actually touch?
A commercial bill has separate components that move independently: supply, delivery, demand and capacity. A measure that cuts consumption reduces the first two. A measure that shifts timing can reduce the third and fourth. Some do both and some do neither.
Ask which lines the proposal affects and by how much. A proposal that quotes only a percentage of total spend is hiding the distinction, and it is the distinction that determines whether the number survives a tariff change.
The money questions
4. What happens if the savings do not appear?
This is the question that separates a performance agreement from a financing agreement wearing its clothes. If the answer is that you still owe the payment, you have bought equipment on credit and the savings language is marketing. That may still be a reasonable deal. It is a different deal from the one being described.
5. Is the term set by the payback or by the equipment life?
A five-year measure on a ten-year agreement means five years of payments against savings that have already been banked. Ask for the expected useful life of each measure alongside the contract term and look at whether they line up.
6. What is the escalator, and what is it tied to?
Many agreements assume utility rates rise by a fixed percentage each year, and the projected savings depend heavily on that assumption. Ask what rate was assumed. Then ask what the savings look like if rates stay flat. If the deal only works on an aggressive escalator, you are not buying conservation, you are taking a position on energy prices.
7. Who owns the equipment at the end?
Ask plainly, and ask what it costs to buy out early. Some structures leave you owning assets outright, some leave you renewing to keep equipment you have already paid for through savings.
The operational questions
8. What is required from my team, and how often?
Savings that depend on staff behaviour decay. If the projection assumes setpoints stay where they were set, doors stay sealed and schedules stay unchanged, ask who is accountable for that and what happens when it drifts. Controls that were installed but never commissioned are the same as controls that were never installed.
9. Who holds the maintenance obligation?
New equipment carries a maintenance cost that may or may not sit inside the savings calculation. Ask whether it is included, who performs it, and what happens to the guarantee if you use your own contractor.
10. What are the exit terms?
Ask what happens if you sell the building, close the site, or simply want out. Exit terms are the least negotiated clause in these agreements and the one most likely to matter, because portfolios change faster than contract terms.
What good answers sound like
A vendor worth working with will answer most of these immediately, will say plainly when a number is an estimate, and will tell you which measures they would not recommend for your building. That last one is the strongest signal available. Anyone who says every measure in their catalogue suits your site has not looked at your site.
Be equally wary of the opposite failure. A proposal dense with technical detail and thin on commercial terms is not more rigorous, it is differently evasive. The ten questions above are mostly commercial, because that is where operators get hurt.
Why I am publishing this
Because an operator who asks these questions is a better customer. They scope work more accurately, they argue less about results, and they stay longer. The deals lost to a good checklist are generally deals that would have gone badly anyway.
There is also a simpler reason. This industry has a credibility problem it earned, built on projections that were never measured and guarantees that quietly depended on assumptions nobody surfaced. The way out of that is not better sales language. It is operators who know what to ask.
Print the list. Use it on us. If you want the analysis run against your own bills before anyone proposes anything, that is work we do at Delta Edge CI.