Energy data for school boards and districts
A school board runs more buildings than most companies, reports on all of them to the province and the trustees, and pays for energy out of the same budget as teachers and textbooks.
The problem
Ontario has 72 district school boards managing 4,861 publicly funded schools, and every school board is a public agency under O. Reg. 25/23. That means an annual summary of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions for each school, submitted by July 1 for the previous calendar year, plus an energy conservation and demand management plan published every fifth year. There is no minimum building size, so portable-heavy sites and small rural schools report the same as a large secondary school.
Energy is one of the largest controllable costs in the sector. In the US, EPA reports that K-12 districts spend over $8 billion on energy each year, that more than 30% of energy use goes to waste, and that ten percent can be saved with low-cost measures. Finding that ten percent requires knowing which schools are drifting, which means comparable data across every building, not a filing cabinet of invoices.
The data work is the bottleneck. A board with a hundred schools has electricity, gas and water accounts for each, often from several utilities with different layouts, plus rate riders, delivery charges and estimated reads that nobody has time to check. The result is a report assembled by hand each spring, a conservation plan that Ontario requires boards to post publicly on their website, and a budget variance no one can explain to the trustees. The fix is a single validated energy record that serves the provincial report, the budget and the operations team at once.
Where we help
Provincial energy and GHG reporting for every school
Bills for every school and admin building become calendar-year consumption and emissions by energy type, tagged to each site, so the annual summary is generated rather than assembled.
School-by-school benchmarking
Compare energy use intensity across the portfolio, weather-normalized, to find the schools that are drifting and prioritize retrofits with data the board can defend.
Utility budget control
Forecast next year's utility budget from actual consumption and current tariffs, and explain variances by school, commodity and driver instead of by guesswork.
Billing errors across every account
Check each bill against its tariff and history so demand, rate-class and estimated-read errors are flagged before accounts payable pays them.
What you get
- Energy and GHG reporting for every school, on time
- A utility budget built from actual data, not last year plus inflation
- Underperforming schools identified from the data, not by complaint
- Billing errors caught across hundreds of accounts
Frequently asked questions
Can MartinAI produce the O. Reg. 25/23 report for a school board?
Yes. The regulation requires the annual energy consumption of each school by energy type, the resulting GHG emissions and the school's operation type, for the calendar year, submitted by July 1. We read every bill for every school, normalize to calendar months and consistent units, tag each meter to its site, and keep the source bill linked to every figure so the summary can be produced and reviewed before submission.
Our schools are served by several utilities with different bill formats. Does that matter?
No. Bills of any layout and every commodity, electricity, natural gas, water, propane or district energy, are read into the same structured record. Each account is mapped once to its school and cost centre, and every later bill lands in the right place automatically. The board's finance and facilities teams see one consistent dataset regardless of which utility issued the invoice.
How does this help with the school board's utility budget?
Budgeting from validated bill data means the forecast starts from actual consumption per school, priced at the current tariff, with weather and enrolment changes visible. During the year, variances can be traced to a specific school, commodity and cause, such as a rate change, a demand spike or a billing error, so the explanation to trustees is specific rather than a shrug.
Can we feed ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager for our schools?
Yes. EPA recommends benchmarking as the first step for K-12 schools, and Portfolio Manager needs monthly consumption per meter in consistent units. The same validated data that supports the provincial report can be exported or pushed to Portfolio Manager for every school, so scores stay current and the low-cost savings EPA describes can be targeted at the buildings that need them most.