How Stanford Is Rebuilding Trust in Campus Energy Data with a Utility Data Layer

This NexusCon 2025 presentation looks at a problem most campuses underestimate until it breaks: energy data you can’t fully trust. Chris Guest, Manager of SUI Business Systems at Stanford, walks through how Stanford uses a utility data historian to support intra-campus billing, resilience planning, and real-time response during heat waves and electrical constraints.

The talk centers on replacing an aging historian and scaling it across thousands of meters, buildings, and use cases. Rather than focusing on dashboards, Chris focuses on the unglamorous work that actually makes energy data usable.

Behind the paywall, Chris shares what went wrong during a large-scale historian migration—and how small assumptions around time zones, compression, and metadata quietly eroded trust with stakeholders. You’ll hear why “mostly right” data isn’t good enough when researchers, engineers, and operators depend on it, and how Stanford is now formalizing standards, validation rules, and governance across ~18,000 points.

The session also digs into practical challenges like parent-child meter relationships, allocating shared meters across buildings, and onboarding new users without tribal knowledge. If you’re responsible for campus-scale energy data, billing accuracy, or resilience analytics, this recording is a hard-earned lesson in getting the foundation right.

Watch the full recording inside Nexus Pro →