Turn Compliance into Competitive Advantage: Use your data for more

*this content has been adapted from a recent webinar, co-hosted with ACEEE. You can access the full panel discussion HERE. 

As energy costs fluctuate, utility programs evolve, and regulatory requirements shift, the pressure to cut costs and mitigate operational risks can supersede your decarbonization goals. But what if they could go hand in hand? 

Effective use of your energy and emissions data is essential in making strategic, cost–effective decarbonization plans, but it can also improve your bottom line and enhance your long-term business resilience. 

For many companies, compliance is the first time all their energy and emissions data is pulled together in one place—and it’s often a real eye-opener. What begins as a task to meet corporate sustainability, regulatory, or customer requirements often uncovers insights with far greater potential. That same data can do more than check a box—it can drive data-informed investment decisions, strengthen staff accountability, and fuel operational improvements that cut costs and improve profits. 

Compliance data can become your foundation for continuous improvement. Here are some of the ways we’ve seen organizations use their data for more:

1. Uncover hidden inefficiencies. Granular energy data can reveal patterns that utility bills miss. One customer discovered equipment running all weekend—an insight that only emerged after aggregating granular data. Fixing it delivered real, measurable savings. 
2. Drive site-level accountability. When performance data is broken out by location or business unit, teams can benchmark and take ownership. We’ve seen customers use dashboards to prompt friendly competition and identify opportunities that can be replicated across the organization. 
3. Prioritize investments based on impact. Centralized data helps organizations model, evaluate, and select the best opportunities and locations based on solid financial criteria, rather than investing in upgrades based on guesswork. By layering cost and usage trends, customers identify which upgrades will deliver the biggest payoff. 
4. Align teams and build executive support. When data is framed around business goals—like reliability, resilience, cost savings, or productivity—it earns trust. We’ve seen teams use compliance data to tell a stronger story, gain budget approval, and keep emissions and decarbonization efforts interwoven with operations. 

The How 

While you might be using energy and emissions data to comply with customer, state, or international requirements on an annual basis, turning that data into actionable, operational improvements can be a challenge. The challenge starts with the fact that no one team owns all the data. Facilities teams may hold energy meter data, sustainability owns emissions factors, finance and accounting has utility bills, and operations teams know what’s actually changing on the ground. These datasets are siloed, tracked in different tools, and rarely structured for sharing, which makes it hard to get a full picture, let alone a trusted one.  

Many companies jump straight to automation, but that often leads to frustration. Don’t assume automation is the best first step. Instead, start by streamlining: map out where your most critical data lives, understand how it’s collected and updated, understand the context of that data, and begin with lightweight ways to bring it together. 

For example, set monthly reminders to download key reports from your utility portal or energy systems. Even lightweight scripts or shared folders can help you start dumping data into one place without a full integration. We’ve seen teams create scorecards or shared dashboards with just a few manual inputs, and it’s often enough to spark the right conversations and momentum. That builds the foundation of trust and visibility you need before layering automation and analytics. Once data is streamlined, the task of automation or identifying gaps where data gathering is painful becomes much more obvious. 

“In our experience, the companies that succeed are the ones that treat data unification as a cross-functional initiative, not just a tech problem,” said Jinsy Oommen, Product Director of Gazebo™, Cascade’s energy management platform. “When sustainability, operations, and IT come together with shared goals, it becomes much easier to move from scattered datasets to real insight and progress.”  

The Why 

When you have the data, real insights follow.  

Fresh Coast Climate Solutions, part of the Cascade Energy family, recently built an emissions profile for a company in the outdoor industry, and they found that out of over 200 suppliers, only 10 of those suppliers were responsible for more than half of this company’s scope 3 emissions.  

“So that’s a great example of where, until you get that data foundation in place, only then are you able to look at your entire operation and really channel your time, resources, money, and focus,” said Josh Brugeman, co-founder and managing partner of Fresh Coast. 

Cascade recently conducted an onsite energy screening for a manufacturing company in Utah to evaluate opportunities to reduce their scope 1 emissions. Through Cascade’s analysis, this site found they could produce hydrogen on site cleaner and cheaper than their local gas supplier. At the time, the facility was using methane to produce hydrogen for their manufacturing process, but through Cascade’s analysis they discovered a viable alternative with a significant savings opportunity. 

“I would encourage people to really think of data gathering as a discovery process, and you’re probably going to find something pretty phenomenal,” said Alex Cimino-Hurt, senior program engineer on Cascade’s market transformation team. 

Key Takeaways 

If you’re ready to start using your energy and emissions data for more than compliance, here are 10 tips to get started: 

1. Start small and smart. Pick pilot sites or a small, tangible project, align it with broader business goals, and celebrate early wins to build credibility and buy-in.  
2. Don’t make it all about emissions. The organizations we see making the most progress are the ones who connect energy and emissions data to business goals – operational efficiency, business resiliency, budget planning, risk management, and cost savings. That’s where you earn attention from both leadership and facility teams. 
3. Find a champion, or maybe two. Find someone on your staff who is motivated to prioritize decarbonization efforts. They will see the overlaps and links between efforts throughout the organization, always keeping decarbonization progress in the back of their mind. If possible, identify leaders at multiple levels of your organization. Establishing and maintaining progress at multiple levels of an organization is how change really sticks.
4. Start with the purpose, not the platform. It’s tempting to search for the perfect tool first—but that can slow you down. Ask: what decisions do you want this data to support? Are you identifying underperforming sites? Prioritizing capital? Tracking progress? Let the business case lead the strategy and don’t feel like you need to centralize every data point on day one. 
5. Collaboration is everything. Bring facility-level managers and engineers into the conversation and listen to them about what’s possible and what’s needed to make things work. Energy, operations, and sustainability teams all hold different parts of the puzzle. The biggest breakthroughs happen when they share visibility and have a common language and interwoven priorities.  
6. Create processes and storytelling around your data. Data alone won’t drive change. Build habits around it. Conduct monthly reviews, share dashboards in team huddles, build goals that generate accountability, and use storytelling to communicate progress. When operators can track and compare their own performance—as well as hold each other accountable—culture starts to shift. 
7. Go after the no-regret projects. No matter what happens in the market, implementing processes and internal capacity to manage energy use and reduce operational costs will be a win.  
8. Start planning now for the long term. Balance your actions today with what you want to achieve in the future. Long-term business resilience and successful decarbonization efforts come from leaders who are willing to look beyond next quarter, farther into the future. 
9. Seek out partners who can help you on your way. Instead of starting from scratch, lean on partners who do this every day. Cascade and Fresh Coast have helped organizations across industries navigate utility programs, conduct energy audits, and turn energy and emissions goals into clear, actionable strategies. With broad program experience and a practical approach, we can help you focus on what’s worth pursuing—and avoid what’s not.  
10. Challenge yourself to do things differently. Ask yourself, how can your company challenge the status quo? How can you engage your entire supply chain in your efforts? How can you work with the purchasing department? How can you work with your C-Suite? Ask yourself, “How can we do it better?”

When companies start looking at their energy and emissions data, compliance is often the first priority, but the real opportunity is turning data into a feedback loop that connects goals to action. Your teams can use the data that they already collect to inform planning, share insights across facilities, and spot trends in near real time.  

Gathering the data is the hard part, and you’re already doing that. With the right tools, mindset, and support, that data becomes a lever for better decisions, resiliency, more efficient operations, and stronger engagement across your organization.  

No matter what, keep evolving. Don’t wait for perfect data to start. Use what you have, build momentum, and improve as you go. Cascade and Fresh Coast are here to help you on the journey, wherever you’re at along the way. Let’s get started.