The vendor is required to provide maintenance, support, and feature upgrades for mass energy insight (MEI), an online, web-based energy-management tool for municipalities, local and regional government entities, and state agencies and authorities in department.
a. Existing features
1. General characteristics
• The MEI shall ensure secure online access to users' data.
• Continual updates to the MEI to maintain speed and functionality, including the back-end architecture and front-end web interface.
• The selected contractor shall ensure that all doer historical content from mass energy insight is properly backed up, migrated, and maintained.
• The ability to make data public upon request by the user or doer to enhance efforts to increase government transparency.
• A method for entities to integrate the country environmental protection agency’s energy star portfolio manager with the MEI.
• Data sharing between the two systems should be bidirectional and automated whenever feasible.
2. Data collection
a. State, regional, and municipal energy data
• Facilitate the seamless delivery of monthly energy usage and cost data to the MEI system for both investor-owned utilities and municipal light plants
• Receive data for both existing and new customer accounts.
• Conduct quality control procedures to ensure data accuracy and completeness.
• Load the verified data into the MEI system for further analysis.
• Receive statewide competitive supply data from the commonwealth’s operational services division contracts and other state entities, perform quality control procedures and load this usage data into MEI.
• Receive oil use data from statewide contract reports, perform quality control procedures, and load this usage data into MEI.
• Receive other energy usage and cost data from competitive suppliers as it becomes available, perform quality control procedures, and load this usage data into MEI.
• Provide a method for individual users to quickly and easily upload to the MEI from microsoft excel spreadsheets additional energy use and cost information, including but not limited to competitive supply, oil, propane, gasoline, diesel, and renewable energy data.
• Collect information for the following data fields from users and other data sources: state secretariat, state agency/authority/group, entity name, entity type, department name, department type, complex name, complex type, complex year built, facility name, unit name, unit year built, facility address, facility municipality, facility zip, facility square footage, facility occupancy, facility year built, facility category, facility subcategory, school type, doer region, division of capital asset management building CAMIS ID number, weather station, fuel type, fuel grade, fuel units, usage start data, usage end data, account number, account status, account provider, account multi-meter (yes/no), account meter number, account street address, account zip, account rate class, peak demand, on-peak energy use, off-peak energy use, and municipality green community status and baseline year.
• Provide a mechanism for data sharing with third-party developers that support other state-owned building energy monitoring systems, such as the commonwealth energy intelligence system, through an application programming interface or other means.
3. Green communities annual reports
a. The MEI will continue to improve its features to streamline data entry for green communities' annual reporting, enabling users to track and report their progress since designation effectively. this historical tracking and reporting will include at a minimum:
• As-of-right zoning and expedited permitting tracking.
• Energy conservation measures (ECMS).
• Municipal vehicle fleet inventory, including vendor-supplied vin decoding tool for data management.
• The selected contractor shall continue to offer and develop tools for doer staff and contractor to review, comment, manage, and approve the annual report data.
4. Climate leader communities’ applications and building data
• The MEI will continue to improve its features to support the climate leader community’s application process and corresponding building data, including but not limited to the building blueprint and decarbonization road map.
5. Data organization
a. Hierarchical data organization:
• The MEI shall maintain the ability to organize data within a user-defined hierarchy of at least five levels
• This includes the ability to easily create, edit, and modify this hierarchy with features such as drag-and-drop functionality.
b. Account management:
• The MEI shall maintain the ability to assign accounts to any level within the hierarchy.
• Features for creating, editing, and managing account assignments and properties shall be preserved, including drag-and-drop functionality and the ability to enter and update energy data by account.
c. Facility-level controls:
• The MEI shall maintain the ability to exclude individual facilities from baseline calculations, assign them to performance contracts, include them in energy use intensity analyses, and designate them as leased spaces.
• The option to include this exclusion in energy reports and visualizations should be included if desired.
6. Analysis and reporting
a. Energy reporting & visualization:
• The MEI shall continue to generate clear and concise energy reports with easy-to-understand graphics for both energy experts and non-experts – providing both visual reports and data tables.
• Trend analysis and anomaly detection capabilities shall be maintained.
• This feature should be expanded.
7. Greenhouse gas emissions calculations:
• MEI shall retain the ability to calculate greenhouse gas emissions using emission factors provided by the doer.
8. Local and regional entity reporting:
a. The MEI shall continue to provide the specified graphical reports for local and regional entities.
• The hierarchical reporting structure (entity, department, complex, facility, unit, account) shall be maintained and allow for easy navigation and data filtering. this feature should be optimized frequently to enhance MEI’S performance.
• Report customization features, such as adding notes to graphical data, shall be preserved.
9. State agency & authority reporting:
a. The MEI shall continue to provide the specified reports for state agencies and authorities, including hierarchical reporting by secretariat, agency, department, complex, facility, unit, and account.
• Key reporting functionalities such as energy use by fiscal year, quarter, and month; cost analysis by secretariat and agency; GHG emissions reporting; and identification of energy-inefficient buildings shall be maintained.
10. Doer analysis reporting:
• The MEI shall provide specified reports for doer analysis of local and regional entity energy use and cost data.
• These reports assist doer in evaluating the effectiveness and impacts of its programs.
• This includes reports on overall energy use and cost, energy use by fuel and facility category, facility performance analysis, municipal energy use and cost per capita, GHG emissions analysis, and data completeness reports.
11. User facilitation
a. Maintenance of the MEI, including both the database and the web-based interface, for both municipal and state systems.
• Provide support to authorized new users, including user credential creation, permission management, password resets, and communication.
• Provide on-demand, web-based training for users to quickly and easily adapt to any changes in MEI.
• Assist municipalities in formatting other energy use and cost data, including competitive supply, oil, gasoline, etc., for loading into MEI.
• Provide customer support to MEI users via email and web-based inquiries, with prompt response and resolution of inquiries and issues.
• Provide the ability to download data, including a pdf of the report screen, an image of individual graphs, actual data in the graph as a table, and all underlying data as a csv file, from MEI.
• Make modifications to MEI to provide and maintain reporting and graphical displays of energy use information as requested by doer.
• Work with doer to provide outreach and education opportunities for users to keep engaged.
12. Accessibility for IT solutions:
• The commonwealth of (commonwealth) is obligated to ensure nondiscrimination and equal access to state services on the part of persons with a disability and reasonable accommodations to state employees with a disability.
• To effectively meet its responsibilities, the commonwealth must achieve accessibility in the acquisition, deployment, and utilization of information technology.
• The commonwealth defines accessibility to include compliance with its enterprise accessibility standards and web accessibility standards.
• These standards encompass the principles of section 508 of the federal rehabilitation act, the world wide web consortium’s web content authoring guidelines, version 2, level aa, and the concept of usability for individuals with disabilities
• Prior to contract execution, the selected contractor must:
1) Provide a VPAT or accessibility testing results for any pre-existing software, including third party software, that vendor is delivering to the commonwealth
2) If the vendor is delivering a SaaS offering, provide access to the offering for accessibility testing
3) Cooperate with the commonwealth on addressing accessibility issues and entering into a mitigation letter if necessary
b. New features
1. General characteristics and data collection
• A user alert feature will be added to MEI, including home screen notification, a user and entity inbox, and automated emails to users
• Notifications for missing bills/data gaps/new account numbers that do not update
• Alert users of unreasonable bill dates, fuel amounts, fuel types, etc. during manual fuel entries
• Enhance and expand integration and synchronization with energy star portfolio manager. prioritize improvements that streamline energy disclosure reporting compliance for state and municipal buildings, addressing local and state mandates.
• Account number validation during new account setup.
• User setup completeness review report including square footage, addresses, and obsolete and invalid accounts.
• Vehicle fleet page:
1) Fuel use from energy data.
2) Vehicles in and out.
3) Vehicle types
2. Data organization
• Solution for communities to break down electric vehicle charging station use from its building’s energy.
• This solution should include the ability to filter the EV charging station use by external EV users and community-owned EVs
• An option to add the community’s fleet EV usage to the vehicle use in category should also be included.
• A database connection to her data for communities to display building code compliance.
• Integrate with external solar production tracking systems to automatically or manually import data generated by on-site renewable energy sources.
• This integrated data, combined with utility consumption data, will provide accurate building electric use.
• The MEI shall build out the option to include or exclude facilities based on user identified exclusions in energy reports and visualizations.
3. Analysis and reporting
• State-wide green communities analytics and reports for doer users.
• Measurement and verification analysis of completed energy conservation measures (ECMS).
• Normalize water and sewer facility energy by water volume.
4. User facilitation
• Search bar for support page.
- Questions/Inquires Deadline: March 28, 2025