Wasting energy is like wasting money. Many businesses have started to realize the economic impacts of wasting energy and its effects on the environment.
Today, businesses are focusing on energy management services so as to lessen environmental impacts and reduce costs.
Goods production needs energy. Whether it is producing oil or manufacturing, you will need energy.
When businesses do their part to manage energy, your wallet, and positive impacts on the environment will be substantial.
What Energy Management Is
This refers to the process of making energy more efficient in business organizations. Energy management may take different forms and usually involves all kinds of energy interactions, including behavioral changes, technological improvements, and procurement.
The process aims to proactively prepare organizations for future energy storage and production to achieve a more sustainable environment.
Energy management services and systems are especially helpful by minimizing the need for on-site upkeep and maintenance and providing total control over energy assets and remote locations.
How It Works
Energy management systems and solutions follow a set of steps during their operations. Firstly, existing modules are configured, or sensors are installed to transmit and collect data in real-time. Any events or errant performance KPIs are reported and may be managed in the solution.
Afterward, the gathered data is usually analyzed to pinpoint optimizations of energy, which are made in energy use, such as maximizing energy sources and minimizing fossil fuel reliance.
Lastly, once all these optimizations are made, you will need to track your metrics. This ensures there are notable changes after making the shift. In other words, energy management involves four stages. These include the following:
- Installation
- Analysis
- Action
- Tracking and repeat
Why Energy Management is Necessary
Management of energy is crucial for various reasons. But mainly, businesses have two reasons for taking it seriously.
Some business organizations prioritize the management of energy simply because they want to minimize their energy costs. Besides, energy is among the highest controllable costs in most business organizations.
According to experts, energy savings of around 45% were attained through energy management across all commercial buildings globally. This recording is equal to $4.5 billion, which business organizations might have saved on energy expenses. Plus, this is an insight into how much money business organizations can save through energy management.
Another reason is environmental impacts. The use of energy remains the source of greenhouse gas emissions or global climate change. Hence, this is pressuring everyone to be more energy efficient.
In 2022 alone, emissions of carbon dioxide from business organizations were projected to be 66.2 million tons. This is a wake-up call for business organizations to limit the effects of climate change.
While some business organizations are proactive in the energy management approach, most are just aiming at complying with the existing regulatory frameworks, like ESOS (Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme). But still, most experts strongly believe that this is not enough. More effort should be put into reaching their carbon targets.
Energy Management Strategies
With the energy crisis making news headlines and many people returning to work, now is the best time for business organizations to use energy management strategies.
Today, energy has become the top corporate agenda, thanks to the rising cost and sweeping social & environmental trends, including net-zero carbon targets and climate change.
Business owners don’t have control over the costs of electricity or gas, as geopolitical issues and market forces determine all these. But there is something they can do – manage energy in their business organizations. The best ways to achieve this may include the following:
1. Monitor Energy Use
Like anything, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. Thus, this trick is all about putting proper monitoring systems in place.
Some experts can help you with this. They have graphing and dashboarding tools that can help you analyze and understand how you use and pay for power.
For a business organization with high energy bills, monitoring systems can be helpful for monitoring areas of energy usage.
2. Consider Implementing an Action Plan
Elements important to implementing an action plan include raising awareness, motivating staff, building capacity, monitoring/tracking progress, and raising awareness.
Communicating your action plan is important and may need an overarching message about progress, policies, and mission.
Although a communication plan is vital for raising awareness about environmental sustainability and energy management, the community and customers must be enlightened on how they may help to improve environmental performance.
3. Assign Responsibilities
In order to prevent efforts for managing energy from coming to a standstill, it is advisable that you assign responsibilities to someone in your business organization.
Some business organizations prefer hiring a qualified energy manager. But others assign the duty to senior executives.
Another option is to outsource energy management to the right consultancy firm. A consultancy firm normally comprises a team of professional energy managers. These managers have experience in executing and planning energy management.
However, you might want to be wary of some consultancy firms. They mostly help other clients. So they won’t be completely available for your business and may not always be onsite to provide the following:
- Training
- Analysis
- Guidance
4. Actively Manage Your Energy Consumption
Energy management experts recommend using the collected data to build strategies, which manage consumption and costs on an annual, monthly, weekly, or daily.
You can partner with an expert to evaluate peak demand reduction strategies. You can also implement demand-limiting and load-shifting systems to minimize costs and limit customer loads, especially during peak hours.
Managing energy consumption will help you to detect system/equipment failures, schedule misalignments, and improper set points early. Analyzing metered point trends over days can also help you pinpoint the excessive run time, leaks, and irregularities.
The Takeaway!
Energy management is important when dealing with regulatory requirements and rising costs. The earlier you get started, the better for you. And in order to do it smartly and right, you will require energy management systems. These systems can also help you optimize and automate steps involved in the energy management process.
