Cascade Energy: Industrial energy engineering, utility SEM programmes and Gazebo software

Overview

Cascade Energy started in 1993 as Cascade Energy Engineering, a Portland firm of industrial engineers with a speciality in industrial refrigeration. Its growth came from utility programmes rather than from selling to factories one at a time. In 2009 Bonneville Power Administration chose it to design and run what became the Energy Smart Industrial programme, including High Performance Energy Management, an early form of strategic energy management (SEM) in which cohorts of plants build energy teams, run low-cost operational fixes and track results against a baseline. BPA renewed the arrangement in 2015 and still names Cascade as its programme partner in its 2025 programme overview.

Software followed the service. Cascade launched its own platform in 2012 to track energy performance, projects and coaching for SEM participants. Its 2018 material calls it SENSEI, it later traded as Energy Sensei, and in August 2024 it was renamed Gazebo with the same features and roadmap. What sets Cascade apart from software-only energy management vendors is that its engineers and coaches deliver the savings the software measures, and that utilities and their evaluators already accept its methods.

The firm is 100 percent employee-owned. Since 2025 it has widened from efficiency into decarbonisation consulting, by bringing in Fresh Coast Climate Solutions, and into demand flexibility, by acquiring Yield Energy in August 2026.

Offering

Cascade sells three different things, and most engagements combine them.

Utility programme delivery (service)

For utilities Cascade designs and runs strategic energy management programmes: participant recruitment, cohort workshops, site walkthroughs, a coach and an industry engineer for each site, savings modelling and evaluation-ready reporting. It also runs streamlined programmes with deemed and calculator-based measures for smaller industrial and agricultural customers, commercial programmes, retrocommissioning programmes, and demand response and load management. The utility pays; the customer receives coaching, engineering and incentives.

Engineering and consulting (service)

For companies directly, Cascade offers energy management services: audits and benchmarking, roadmaps, incentive applications, metering design and installation, retrocommissioning of refrigeration, HVAC, compressed air, chillers, steam and wastewater systems, and multi-site reporting. Fresh Coast Climate Solutions, part of Cascade since 2025, adds greenhouse gas inventories, decarbonisation plans and sustainability reporting. Cascade is a US Department of Energy 50001 Ready Partner and says its SEM programme completes 12 of the 25 50001 Ready tasks.

Software

• Gazebo is the SaaS platform for energy models, a savings ledger, project registers, persistence tracking and portfolio roll-ups, sold to utilities and implementers to run programmes and to corporations to manage sites.
• Gazebo Connect is a metering subscription: Cascade installs revenue-grade meters and cellular gateways and Gazebo analyses the 15-minute data, in Monitor, Optimize and Partner tiers.
• Yield, a business unit since August 2026, runs an automated DERMS that pays growers for flexibility from irrigation equipment, with a 200 MW portfolio.

Technology

Gazebo

Gazebo is a hosted web application. Its data security page says customer data sits in Amazon Web Services, encrypted at rest with AES-256 and in transit with TLS 1.2 or higher, that access follows least privilege with role-based controls written alongside each feature, and that the application is penetration-tested every year. Programme methods are meter-based: Energy Trust of Oregon chose the platform because its SEM and Pay for Performance programmes use regression models to track performance and measure savings. 2024 releases added more savings forecasting methods, energy use intensity tables against baseline and a persistence tab for each project.

Data in

Gazebo Connect specifies the hardware: revenue-grade meters at plus or minus 0.5 percent or better, a NEMA 4 enclosure, a 4G cellular gateway, a data acquisition unit with pulse input and, where needed, a battery-powered wireless pulse transmitter, wired to the utility meter's communication port. Data arrives in 15-minute intervals and is kept for 24 months (36 in the Partner tier), with CSV, Excel and PDF export. The Gazebo site also describes integration with utility AMI data, and Cascade's engineering pages describe Ethernet or cellular links to main electric, gas and water meters plus subsystem monitoring on compressed air, refrigeration, HVAC and production equipment.

What is missing

BMS integration is offered for a one-time fee without naming protocols or platforms. No public API, no Modbus, BACnet or OPC UA support and no named historian connectors are documented, which matters under the EMS lens of fast onboarding and clear export paths.

Assurance

Cascade states that it holds a SOC 2 Type II report verified each year by a third-party auditor, covering asset management, physical access, risk monitoring, incident response and business continuity; the Gazebo Connect page dates the annual audits to 2019. The auditor is not named.

Customers

Bonneville Power Administration

Cascade has delivered BPA's Energy Smart Industrial programme since 2009. BPA's programme overview, revised in September 2025, says Cascade performs facility scoping studies, custom project assessments, measurement and verification, SEM coaching and industrial lighting support, and that the programme has completed over 7,000 projects, 240 aMW of first-year savings and more than $850 million of avoided energy costs across 1,800 facilities in seven states. BPA's industrial page gives a lower count of more than 900 facilities for the same 240 aMW.

San Diego Gas & Electric and NASSCO

Cascade implements SDG&E's SMART Industrials SEM programme under contract. In it, General Dynamics NASSCO completed 55 projects from 2018 to 2022, 22 of them on compressed air, for an estimated 3.6 million kWh and more than $500,000 a year by engineering calculation. The San Diego Regional EDC reports that 60 percent of the companies at its 2024 recruiting webinar joined the next cohort.

Other programmes and users

• Energy Trust of Oregon selected the platform in 2021 for SEM and Pay for Performance programmes with hundreds of active participants.
• National Grid and Eversource chose Cascade in 2018 for a three-year SEM demonstration in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
• San Antonio Water System uses Gazebo for its energy strategy, according to the Gazebo site.
• The success stories page lists Bimbo Bakeries, Sysco Suppliers, Idaho Power, Zirkle Fruit, Gills Onions, JM Eagle, IDEX Health & Science and Terrapin Care Station.

Markets

Cascade works almost entirely in North America. Its office list runs to 15 locations: Portland (headquarters) and Eugene in Oregon, San Diego, Fresno, the Bay Area and Los Angeles in California, Denver, Boise, Chicago, the Twin Cities, Salt Lake City, Walla Walla, Seattle, the Northeast and Michigan. It reports SEM work at more than 750 sites in 20 states and provinces, and its streamlined-programme model has been repeated in California, Idaho and British Columbia.

Buyers

The largest buyers are utilities and programme administrators that fund efficiency from ratepayer charges and need evaluated savings. The company's utility pages show logos for ComEd, SoCalGas, BPA, NYSERDA, SDG&E, Eversource, Idaho Power, Rocky Mountain Power, BC Hydro, Xcel Energy, Consumers Energy and Puget Sound Energy, though the pages do not describe each relationship. Corporations buy energy management, metering and decarbonisation services directly, and a public-sector practice supports state and federal programmes.

Sectors

Industrial depth is the selling point: food and beverage, cold storage and industrial refrigeration, water and wastewater, industrial heat pumps, shipbuilding, plastics, metal finishing, cement and agriculture. The Yield acquisition adds California growers enrolled in demand flexibility, which Cascade plans to extend to its industrial and commercial customers.

Company

Ownership and structure

Cascade Energy was founded in 1993 and is headquartered at 630 SW 5th Avenue in Portland, Oregon. It describes itself as 100 percent employee-owned; its founder remains on the board as founder emeritus. The website footer names the company Cascade Energy, LLC, while SDG&E programme material from 2023 names the implementer as Cascade Energy Inc.

Acquisitions

• Fresh Coast Climate Solutions joined in 2025, bringing greenhouse gas accounting, decarbonisation strategy and sustainability consulting; its team is based in Michigan.
• Yield Energy (Polaris Energy Services, Inc.), a California demand flexibility company, was acquired on 11 August 2026 for undisclosed terms. It brings a 200 MW agricultural portfolio and an automated DERMS and operates as a business unit within Cascade. The Peak Load Management Alliance carried the announcement.

Goals and record

In 2016 Cascade set itself a goal of 8,000 GWh of sustained savings by 2028 and reports reaching 64 percent of it by 2025; in 2022 it set a goal of 1.7 million tonnes of CO2e saved by 2024 and reports 60 percent achieved by 2025. Its 2015 BPA contract release described it as one of the largest US companies dedicated to industrial energy efficiency, with more than 3,000 completed projects at the time. LinkedIn shows about 320 staff, up 29 percent in two years. Cascade received Great Place to Work certification in December 2025.