Industrial Utilities Curriculum & Resource Development

A complete online curriculum covering how industrial facilities are billed for, and can reduce costs on, electricity, natural gas, and water. The four units move from foundational concepts through hands-on bill analysis and recommended actions:

• Unit 1 — Introduction: orientation to industrial utility types and how the curriculum is organized.
• Unit 2 — Understanding Your Bills: key concepts, an interactive bill-annotation tool, and tariff-type breakdowns.
• Unit 3 — Analyzing Your Bills: organized, basic, and in-depth analysis techniques.
• Unit 4 — Common Recommendations: seven common cost-reduction recommendations with supporting resources.

Each unit uses a shared library of interactive components built specifically for this curriculum — self-check quizzes, collapsible worked-example walkthroughs, and a formatted equation system for tariff and energy calculations — so the learning experience stays consistent across all four units and any future units that are added.

Alongside the curriculum content, this project built the surrounding WordPress infrastructure at gccoe.org that hosts and connects all of GCCoE’s educational materials, including:

• A Resource Library collecting reference material for facility teams and students.
• An AI Prompt Library for applying generative AI tools to utility analysis work.
• This Student Research page, showcasing individual research projects like this one.

Every component was built using WordPress’s native block editor rather than paid plugins, and documented in a shared component-reference guide — because the site is intended to be handed off to a future maintainer with no development background.

To support the field side of the ITAC program, this project also standardizes the Excel-based data-collection workbooks that student auditors use during on-site industrial energy assessments. The suite currently spans ten major energy systems — steam, compressed air, motors, pumps, chillers, cooling towers, HVAC, lighting, furnace/oven, and water — all built to a shared house style so that data collected across different systems and different student teams stays consistent and comparable.

Recent work has focused on ARC (Assessment Recommendation Code) reverse-lookup tables, which invert the standard data-collection relationship to show each ARC code alongside its description and the specific data points required to support it — helping students go from raw field data to a monetized recommendation more directly.