Energy Saving Advice
- Guides
It makes sound business sense to use less energy. Did you know that low cost energy saving actions can reduce your energy bills by up to 10%? For most businesses a 20% cut in consumption represents the equivalent of a 5% increase in sales! To help get you started, please find below some hints and tips that we’ve compiled with the help of The Energy Saving Company.
Beyond shopping around, there are professional energy brokers and business energy consultancies who can offer bespoke utilities solutions and strategies for the management of all of your commercial electricity, water and gas requirements. They will evaluate your existing business energy usage, contract renewals and savings by way of rebates. They also work with you to find energy solutions that meet your immediate and future commercial energy requirements.
Monitoring and Targeting
These techniques allow your business to relate energy consumption data with business operations so you can better understand how energy is being used. This can be applied to any organisation in any industrial, private or public sector. Energy management activities allow you to:
- Detect energy wastage, leading to cost and energy savings.
- Identify avenues for further investigation and saving potential.
- Improve staff awareness, budget setting and benchmark forecasts.
Carbon Footprinting
Calculating your carbon footprint can be an effective tool for continued energy and environmental management; helping to identify, prioritise and focus on areas for improvement. Organisations calculate their carbon footprint for a number of reasons:
- Corporate social responsibility and marketing purposes.
- Providing evidence to customers, businesses or investors of their CO2, carbon and other greenhouse gas reductions.
- Provide audit information to work out levels of emission they need to offset in order to become carbon neutral.
You can calculate your organisation’s Carbon Footprint on the Carbon Trust website.
Staff Training
Personnel are essential to the operation of any business and play a key role in an organisation’s energy reduction goals. By working with staff and implementing ethical practices you can:
- Encourage staff to be more pro-active and take action.
- Improve teamwork and morale.
- Increase environmental awareness.
- Reduce business costs.
- Energy ‘walk arounds’
In order to achieve continued environmental sustainability in your organisation, conduct regular housekeeping walk arounds. By recording or acting on maintenance issues you can identify further opportunities for energy saving. Conduct a series of walk arounds at various times of the day. This will provide an accurate picture of when energy might be being wasted.
Prove Your Credentials
Open up new markets and make a powerful statement about your organisation’s environmental credentials with the ISO 14001 environmental management standard. Not only does the standard help you demonstrate conformity with legal requirements, it can also help cut energy consumption and waste management costs.