Energy Points today launched the world's first universal metric for measuring sustainability, empowering businesses to make quantitative and intuitive project decisions across all environmental domains - including fuel, electricity, transportation and water.

The company also announced that it secured a $3 million initial round of financing led by Plan B Ventures. The financing will be used to launch and accelerate the adoption of The EnergyPoints platform - the first Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform to power quantifiable and measureable sustainability decisions. As part of the financing, Plan B Ventures partner Barbara Goldman will join Energy Points' board of directors.

According to the 2011 Sustainability & Innovation Global Executive Study and Research Project by MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group, 68 percent of companies said their focus on sustainability increased in the past year, while 66 percent of respondents stated that it was necessary to be competitive1. Despite this belief, there is no universal standard for measuring sustainability in an actionable way. While some companies measure it in terms of overall cost reduction, others measure Greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Taken separately, these are laudable goals, but they do not account for the variables that can impact sustainability, including different fuel sources, geographic locations, electricity generation and more. To make impactful and measurable decisions, Energy Points provides executives with a universal metric that generates a comprehensive and uniform view of how different sustainability initiatives impact an organization.

Energy Points provides a true measure of environmental sustainability by converting all domains (including electricity, water, transportation, etc…) into a single common unit of measurement. This enables businesses, utilities and energy service companies (ESCOs) to make comparative, intuitive and fact-based decisions across all business locations, generating a greater financial and environmental return. Businesses can also measure their exposure to the changing energy market, estimate its environmental footprint and compare sustainability performance against competitors.

"Recent data shows that consumers reward companies that exhibit sustainable behavior - the problem is that businesses can't communicate their sustainability in a simple and consistent way. By not demonstrating their corporate sustainability in clear and quantitative terms, they're leaving opportunities and revenue on the table," said Dr. Ory Zik, founder and CEO of Energy Points. "By converting all energy sources and domains to one simple metric, businesses can now make decisions based on their true financial and environmental impact, while providing clear, consistent evidence of their own sustainability. They finally have quantitative proof which projects will have the greatest impact, based on parameters such as local water scarcity, local electricity source mix and financial savings."

Sustainability Decisions Made Simple

The EnergyPoints™ platform makes sustainability understandable for a broad, non-technical audience - moving the discussion beyond non-intuitive metrics. Based on years of development work and validation by leading faculty and researchers at Boston University and MIT, Energy Points translates all measures of energy into a simple, universally understood metric - the equivalent of the embodied energy of one gallon of gasoline.

The gallon of gasoline is the most relevant, intuitive and widely understood unit of measurement in the U.S. - people can easily understand the gallon of gas as a frame of reference, from energy output through cost. Utilized as a baseline, this enables organizations to measure all the factors involved in sustainability within a single unit. This allows for fact-based comparisons of different projects, providing insight into how they would impact the location where they're implemented.

For instance, while LED lighting may be beneficial in a factory located on the east coast, a new water management system may be better suited for a similar factory located on the west coast given the vagaries of power generation and water scarcity. Because the financial and environmental aspects of sustainability can now be quantified, businesses no longer have to make "one-size-fits-all" sustainability project decisions.

Sustainability as a Science

The EnergyPoints platform combines a unique analytics algorithm with GIS data that normalizes all sustainability information to provide the true value of the natural resources being consumed. These measurements are computed across an entire organization and are based on the local mix of energy resources and resource scarcity (such as water). The platform provides further measurement across regions, states, cities and even specific facilities to get a true account on the impact of an organization's sustainability initiatives.

Once the data is normalized into Energy Points, the information is presented through a rich, visual-analytics portal, providing executives with an easy-to-use and intuitive interface to understand, compare, track and forecast sustainability across an organization. Businesses can now make informed sustainability decisions based on the specific impact on the location they're implemented and can communicate those decisions clearly.

"We believe that Energy Points will change the way sustainability decisions are made - providing businesses with the tools to make decisions based on their true organizational impact," said Barbara Goldman, partner at Plan B Ventures. "We look forward to supporting the company's growth and the establishment of the Energy Point as the defacto sustainability standard."

About Energy Points

Energy Points is a cloud-based calculation engine that enables businesses to make quantitative and intuitive sustainability decisions, facilitating greater financial and environmental ROI. Using proprietary algorithms, coupled with geospatial and temporal databases, the EnergyPoints platform converts sustainability domains, such as electricity, water and transportation, into common universal metric. Founded in 2011 by Dr. Ory Zik, who previously founded QuantomiX and HelioFocus, and co-founded by Roy Stein, previous EVP Operations of Grid Point, Energy Points is privately held and headquartered in Cambridge, Mass. For more information, please visit www.energypoints.com