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The big buzzword in energy management is avoidance. Cost avoidance, use avoidance, it's all about what we didn't have to spend or use. Our program first started in August 2001. The first month was dedicated to the collection and data entry of all energy-related bills for the entire district, creating our base year, 2000. This became the standard by which we would compare and measure our success. Now all we have to do is compare how much we spent on energy in September 2001, compared to the same month last year. If only it were so simple! What if September 2001 was colder than last year? We would need to run the heaters more, and it would appear that our costs were up compared to our base year. That's a bad thing! But, what if it was warmer? Less heat would be needed so costs would be down. That's a good thing! In other words, we'd be measuring our success dependent on the weather, not our efforts to reduce usage. To level the playing field and get an accurate indication of how we're doing, we had to go high tech. So we took all the billing information from our base year, historical weather data in the form of temperature for our area as well as basic building information and entered it in a piece of software called "EnergyCap". This would compare current costs to the base year, make corrections and give us a number called "cost avoidance".