Your energy contractor is grading their own homework. We're the second opinion.
Independent measurement and verification for owners who wrote a check and want to know if it actually worked. A licensed operating engineer reads your meter data, rebuilds the baseline, and hands you a report signed by a real name. No dashboards to buy. No multi-year contract. No relationship with the vendor whose savings we're checking.
Almost every energy savings claim in NYC is self-reported.
“The company that installed the controls is the company that tuned them. The company that tuned them is the same company that tells you they worked.”
Utility bills go up and down for a hundred reasons: weather, occupancy, tenant loads, equipment cycling, meter changes, rate schedules. When your ESCO reports "we saved you 18%," or your controls contractor reports "the retrofit paid back in 14 months," or your optimization vendor's dashboard shows a green number, you have no independent way to check whether the baseline was drawn honestly, the adjustments were fair, or the savings would have happened anyway. That's not fraud. That's how the industry is structured. It's also why lenders, boards, DOB filings, and ESG auditors increasingly require third-party M&V. We are that third party.
Any owner whose savings report was written by the vendor being paid on the savings.
If any of these describe a check you wrote in the last 24 months, an independent M&V review pays for itself the first time the numbers don't match.
Guaranteed savings contracts where the ESCO writes the M&V plan, sets the baseline, and reports its own performance every year. IPMVP Option C is easy to shape with baseline adjustments.
The contractor installed the new BAS and did the tuning, and asks you to trust that it saved 15%. No third party ever reads the trend logs after startup. Setpoints drift back within 18 months.
The vendor's own dashboard is the only source of truth for savings. Baseline set by the vendor. Renewal decisions rest on the vendor's own report. Beautiful UI, no external audit.
Commissioning agent identifies the finding AND takes credit for the fix. Reports to the same PM who hired them. Year-2 performance rarely gets checked at all.
Aggregator reports curtailment performance and settlement to the owner. Owner has no independent read on delivered kW or event compliance.
Operator reports generation and demand-charge savings from its own meter data. Owner has no revenue-grade check against utility billing.
The consultant helping you file also chose the emissions factors, occupancy adjustments, and pathway. No pre-submission sanity check by an outside engineer.
Post-project M&V is often performed by the same firm that installed and got paid. Rebate claim audit trail depends on the implementer's own report.
Vendor-side M&V vs. independent M&V.
Vendor-side M&V isn't dishonest, it's just structurally biased. Independent M&V is what you buy when the report has to survive a lender, a board, or a DOB question.
Same product ladder. Different lens on the same work.
MER runs one ladder for the whole practice: a $495 Snapshot to size up the situation, a $2,500 audit to do real analysis, and a $3–6K/mo retainer for owners who want independence made permanent. For vendor-report verification, the same tiers apply. The deliverable emphasis shifts, the price does not.
The same $495 Snapshot every MER buyer gets, with one addition for vendor-report buyers: an overlay chart comparing the vendor's claimed savings against your actual utility-bill trajectory, weather-normalized.
- 12 months of utility bills, weather-normalized
- LL97 exposure through 2050
- Peer benchmarking + emissions
- Vendor claim vs. actual-bill overlay chart
- 100% credited toward a paid engagement
A sibling of our Rapid Diagnostic, scoped for backward-looking verification instead of forward-looking ECM discovery. No site walk. No 3x savings guarantee. What you get instead is deeper paper analysis: independent baseline reconstruction, IPMVP methodology review, and a variance analysis against the vendor's reported number.
- 24 months of utility bills, IPMVP-normalized
- Independent baseline reconstruction
- Weather + occupancy corrections applied fresh
- Vendor methodology review (Option A/B/C compliance)
- 10–15 page CMVP-signed report with variance analysis
- Findings suitable for a board, lender, or renewal negotiation
- 60-min findings call
Where most audit buyers end up. Once the vendor's numbers have been checked once, boards and lenders start asking for that check every quarter. Continuous IPMVP-compliant M&V with quarterly board-ready summaries, annual re-baselining, on-call verification.
- Continuous trend monitoring
- Quarterly board-ready summary (feeds ESG reporting)
- Annual re-baselining
- On-call verification for new vendor claims
- First-priority scheduling for one-off requests
Credentials that specifically say "not selling anything."
Certified Measurement & Verification Professional. AEE credential. The credential the M&V protocol is named after.
FDNY Refrigerating System Operating Engineer, unlimited tonnage. Currently operating a Class A NYC building's central plant every shift.
Automation and BMS engineering across commercial, institutional, and industrial. Deep Alerton, JCI Metasys, and Siemens depth.
MER does not install controls, sell hardware, or take savings shares. Every engagement is one-time or retainer, paid by the owner.
"Doesn't MER also do optimization work? Who checks your numbers?"
Yes, MER also performs optimization work through the Plant Optimization Sprint. On those projects, the same structural conflict we describe on this page could technically apply to us. Our posture on that:
Any owner hiring MER for optimization work is free to hire their own independent CMVP to verify our savings. We'll cooperate fully with any third-party reviewer's data requests, share our IPMVP methodology openly, and treat their findings as we'd treat our own.
That's a standing invitation, not a hoop. Some owners want the extra layer, most don't. Either way, every MER report cites the methodology, shows the math, and carries a CMVP signature — the same discipline we apply when auditing anyone else. Independence in this industry isn't a badge, it's a practice.
Questions owners ask before hiring.
What if we already like our vendor and don't want to fight them?+
Do we need the vendor's cooperation?+
What if we don't have a good baseline to start from?+
How is this different from the M&V Retainer?+
Does the report actually count for anything?+
Are you biased against optimization SaaS companies?+
Start with a 30-minute fit call.
Send the vendor report you want checked, or describe the situation. We'll tell you honestly whether a $495 Snapshot is enough, whether you need the $2,500 Rapid M&V Audit, or whether the retainer is the right next step. No pressure to book a tier before we understand your situation.