Walking around a university campus, we kept asking the same question: how does a place this large not know where its energy goes? MSU spends $28 million a year on electricity with no building-level visibility, no benchmarks, and no clear path to its 2035 carbon goals. That gap between what universities spend and what they understand is what inspired VOLTZ.
VOLTZ scores every campus building 0 to 100 across five factors, matches each building to its highest-performing peer at a comparable university using five hard filters including climate zone and building type, then generates a fully funded and sequenced action plan to close the gap. Instead of guessing at solutions, we find universities that already solved the exact same problem and copy what worked.
We aggregated public data from EPA ENERGY STAR, IPEDS, DOE CBECS, and 700 university Carbon Commitment Reports into a peer benchmarking engine. The scoring model runs a regression trained on the 25 percent of buildings that have smart meters to infer energy behavior across the rest. The platform was built as a full single-page web application with a live simulation engine, grant finder, contractor marketplace, and implementation roadmap.
The biggest challenge was building a fair comparison system. You cannot compare a 1978 chemistry lab to a 2020 LEED building and call it benchmarking. We built five hard filters that must all pass before any peer match is made, which meant a lot of the national dataset got filtered out before we found genuinely comparable peers.
The data to solve this problem already exists and is publicly available. The gap is not information, it is connection. Nobody had linked federal building performance databases to peer institution outcomes and turned it into a decision-ready action plan. That connection is what VOLTZ is.
Every building that VOLTZ fixes becomes the peer match for the next university with the same problem. MSU is customer zero. The platform scales without any new data collection because the peer database grows with every deployment.
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