Energy Efficiency Investments Picking Up Steam

Growing Database Hits 1,000 Projects Milestone, Representing $53 Million in Investments at Prominent Colleges and Other Institutions

The Green Revolving Investment Tracking System (GRITS 1.2), the only energy efficiency project management tool on the market, has surpassed 1,000 completed resource and energy conservation projects in its Library, a milestone for those in the energy efficiency field looking for a comprehensive data-sharing tool. These 1,000 sustainability projects from more than 180 institutions across the U.S. and Canada are shared inside a Library so that energy and water saving concepts can be recreated on other campuses, providing inspiration and real-world data to users across North America.

GRITS was created and developed by the Sustainable Endowments Institute (SEI), a Boston-based research nonprofit organization. GRITS was originally developed by SEI to help colleges manage their green revolving funds (GRF), a financing mechanism that internally reinvests financial savings from energy efficiency projects into additional projects. After GRITS’ initial success in managing financial performance data and tracking energy and carbon reductions, SEI developed an expanded version of GRITS that is designed for institutions to track all energy and resource-saving projects.

The GRITS tool has seen rapid growth in the Library, nearly tripling in size percent just since January. With an increasing number of energy efficiency projects currently shared, the tool is useful for anyone seeking new project ideas or searching for real-world performance data from already completed projects.

GRITS projects come from colleges and universities, K-12 schools, hospitals, and local and state governments. Users can easily browse through the more than one thousand projects by using filters to narrow down their selection by project type, cost, payback period, geographic region,  and even specific institution.

“GRITS has been a valuable resource for many institutions since the 1.0 version was launched in April 2014.”  Said Mark Orlowski, Founder and Executive Director of SEI. “Now that we have a critical mass of projects and institutions using it, GRITS can reach its full potential and share energy efficiency project data among hundreds of universities and other institutions striving to achieve similar goals.”

To date, GRITS has been used to track projects that collectively total more than $53,969,315; these projects have saved $34,444,765 in utility costs and abated 1,114,772 metric tons of carbon-dioxide equivalent emissions.

For more information on GRITS, please click here.