Brookdale Senior Living: Meeting the Needs of Retirement Communities

Brookdale Senior Living operates assisted and independent living centers and retirement communities for middle and upper-income elderly clients. With more than 650 facilities across 36 states, the organization’s complicated energy spend represented a significant management challenge.

Brookdale Senior Living partnered with ENGIE Impact to support Brookdale’s energy management team, particularly in helping source its deregulated energy needs. Brookdale also wished to streamline operations by working with a single sourcing vendor that could manage its portfolio. Given its deep understanding of deregulation, ENGIE Impact was able to help Brookdale capitalize on savings, balance its risk management efforts and secure its budget.

Prior to ENGIE Impact’s support, Brookdale had numerous contracts spread across multiple territories. Many sites were left unmanaged and there was little transparency into the overall portfolio. Brookdale’s team sought to gain a better understanding of the contracts currently in place, as well as the status of contracts currently under negotiation.

Building An Energy Strategy

To ensure that the energy procurement strategy aligned with Brookdale’s risk objectives, ENGIE Impact’s senior sourcing advisor worked with Jeff Patton, Vice President of Procurement, the executive team and decision makers to evaluate the risk profile. ENGIE Impact leveraged the combination of low risk tolerance and historically low energy prices to develop a hedging strategy. That strategy, together with ENGIE Impact’s knowledge of market timing, has allowed Brookdale to enter into multiple fixed price agreements that have optimized cost, while reducing budget risk.

With a solid energy procurement strategy in place, ENGIE Impact continued to drive savings for the entire portfolio through a comprehensive analysis of the remainder of Brookdale’s energy contracts.

This process enabled ENGIE Impact to identify and resolve additional opportunities, including:

• Multiple marketers were managing various contracts, adding unnecessary costs.
• Deregulated states were not fully managed, leaving some sites unable to capitalize on avoiding costs with the local utility.

Due to market conditions, Brookdale operational behaviors and Brookdale locations can change at any time, ENGIE Impact continues to perform these audits on an ongoing basis in order to ensure active portfolio management.

Additionally, ENGIE Impact provides Brookdale with the necessary benchmark reporting to evaluate the performance of their energy procurement program and make adjustments to their strategy as conditions dictate.

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Results

The collective efforts allowed ENGIE Impact to provide an estimated year-over-year savings of $1,077,760 within deregulated territories in the first year alone. Utilizing proprietary analytic and market intelligence tools, ENGIE Impact has timed the market well to optimize costs for Brookdale Senior Living.

By the next year, Brookdale had more than 40 energy supply agreements in place and had eliminated an additional $784,924 year-over-year.

Next Steps

Looking ahead, ENGIE Impact will continue to work with Brookdale to strategically align the structure and term of its energy contracts with Brookdale’s overall procurement portfolio strategy. Brookdale’s active role in fulfilling the current strategy has been indispensable to the success of the program—and will continue to be instrumental to ensuring the proper strategic response to market conditions.

Brookdale Senior Living has also had success working with ENGIE Impact to improve energy efficiencies across their portfolio. Utilizing a dedicated energy manager, Brookdale has accomplished significant energy reductions based on the data captured by ENGIE Impact through energy performance reports and outlier analysis. Learn more about our energy management solutions.