Data Confidentiality and Disclosure

The MSU IAC acknowledges that facility data and its handling with care is important, so the center strives to be transparent with privacy measures. The site-specific data collected is used to prepare each facility’s individual assessment report. The company’s name and address do not appear in the report. Upon completion, the report is sent solely to the company it is created for. The report will not be sent to the Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, Occupational Safety & Health Administration or any regulatory body. In addition, it will not be released to vendors, utilities or anyone else outside of the Industrial Assessment Center program. However, to ensure continued high quality, all of the MSU IAC reports are reviewed by an organization that manages this program for the United States Department of Energy.

Some data from the report are entered into a national database available for public access on the Internet at Industrial Assessment Centers. This database is a valuable tool for manufacturers and researchers who want to know the savings of various types of projects. The data entered into the national database that is available for public access includes:

• Industrial Assessment Center performing the assessment (Michigan State University)

• State where facility is located

• Assessment date

• Facility SIC/NAICS, principal product, floor area and number of employees 

• Annual sales, volume, production hours and energy cost

• Name, type, estimated annual resource savings, annual cost savings, implementation cost, simple payback and implementation status of each assessment recommendation.

The IAC’s work in your facility may be a good subject for a future case study; however, such a case study will be subject to facility review and approval. The MSU IAC may be asked to supply a list of facility names and addresses for facilities we have served to the Department of Energy in order to make public a list of program participants. The list will not associate facility names with report numbers or other facility production, operation, or cost data. In addition, the MSU IAC may call the facility in question after a few months to ask about project implementation, and other follow-up may include a survey.

Some individual assessment recommendations make excellent teaching tools and are used as examples on the IAC website at MSU IAC. However, there is no linkage between individual assessment recommendations used as teaching examples and the company or assessment.