Appoint someone as the ‘energy champion’ of your organisation.  Looking after energy might be a full-time job, but it should have the backing and recognition of everyone, including top management.

The energy champion should be:

• Vigilant – looking out for waste and inefficiency
• Encouraging – motivating all staff to take an interest in energy efficiency
• Organised – responsible for developing a programme of duties and monitoring activities
• Active – recommending improvements and where necessary cost effective investment (see our pages on ‘Funding Energy Efficiency’ to find out what grants and loans are available.)

Measure how much energy your organisation is currently using.  Energy use quite often goes unaccounted for.  Estimated energy bills and infrequent monitoring of both expenditure and actual usage means you could find it difficult to account for how your energy is being used and how much it costs.  A vital step towards reducing energy costs and increasing efficiency is to keep a close eye on how much you are actually using.  To help gain control of the situation you should:

See what past information is available by reviewing energy invoices and analysing the data month on month or year on year

Ensure you carry out regular in-house meter readings for all major fuels.  By providing your own, accurate meter readings to us, we can ensure your bills are up to date, and this could help pinpoint periods of particularly high energy usage.  If necessary, sub-meter important areas of use.

Make an inventory of all equipment around the business that uses large amounts of energy.  Ensure you know when the equipment in likely to be in use, and what the energy rating is.  Carry out spot checks to make sure equipment is not being used unnecessarily.

Walk around the building to assess when and where energy is used.  Investigate energy usage outside normal working hours, when cleaning for example.

Speak to colleagues about energy wastage – they might have identified areas of high usage or particular wastage but not known what to do about it.

Use your current energy use as a benchmark to compare your consumption with similar businesses, previous monitoring periods or to set targets.

Collecting data on past energy usage will allow you to make comparisons over time.  Once you have collected enough information, you can benchmark consumption against either your previous performance or against other sites or businesses.

Find the most obvious areas of waste and identify where investment is needed.  At the same time as monitoring and comparing, it’s worth trying to identify where savings can be made.  This can range from a simple identification of waste to a detailed investigation into ‘best practice’ technologies.  Examples of activities might be:

Walking through the buildings at different times, particularly during ‘quiet periods’ and out of hours, and spotting where things can be turned off.

Keeping an eye on seasonal changes and the setting of heating, lighting and air conditioning systems.

Briefing out of hours staff (e.g. security and cleaning staff) to switch equipment off when they leave the building/carry out security checks.

Identify the big energy users and identify equipment and techniques that can help to cut costs.

Work out an action plan to make the company more energy efficient and competitive.  Implement it involving all key staff.  When you know what energy you’re using, where you’re using it and how it can be saved.  You’re in a position to develop a strategy to cut energy use.  Key steps should be:

Draw up a hierarchy of activities – starting with no cost/low cost actions, then medium-term modifications and finally long-term investments (our downloadable energy worksheets can help you do this).

Obtain the interest and commitment of others in drawing up your list of priorities.  For it to work, everybody within the business must take ownership of the plan.

Set out a timetable of tasks and targets and say who will be responsible for them.

Get the approval of your managers/owners of the business.

Let everybody know and the make it happen.

Keep your control system under constant review.  For energy efficiency to be an ongoing, living thing, planned actions need to be tracked, followed-up and eventually evaluated.  The evaluation should be fed back to management and all staff who have been involved in the process, making them aware of how and where progress is being made.

Constant emphasis on improvement will make ‘energy efficiency thinking’ second nature until it eventually becomes part of the ‘culture’ of the organization. 

Progress should be continuous, so your technical ability, in terms on monitoring equipment and knowledge, must grow until the evaluation, choice and operation of efficiency equipment and techniques become second nature.

Going full circle, and back to the early steps of comparison, identification, planning, implementation and so on, makes the steps a virtuous circle of energy efficiency improvement.