Week 5 - 11 Week Energy Challenge

This stage of the process is one of the most challenging parts and at the same time one of the most rewarding. The process will start to provide so much visibility into the organisation’s 3rd largest expense (although recently this is not the case across all countries) but it is still a significant cost.

I believe just by following part of the process you will start to implement a minimum of 2% savings. Why? This is because the organisation will start to understand where the costs are and surprisingly enough this is probably the first time in the history of the organisation that they will see where the energy is being used and more importantly how much it is being used.

This part of the process is very desk driven but it may involve some exploratory work on your assessment regarding ‘databasing’ the meters. The first part of this process is where you start to understand what area of energy is being consumed and what the sources of data are going to be.

The above table shows the areas in which we need to focus the data collection from. We will get some indication of this from the ‘Scoping Document’ and then further clarification can be made on the assessment day. At this stage keep an open mind as we always find a hidden meter or a different source of energy.

I have implemented my own process regarding reporting on this stage and I have followed this through for many a client.

1.     Prepare a “Meter Report” – This will provide you with all the meters that are used within the organisation for fiscal billing. This report will comprise of company, property, address, utility, meter reference number, supplier, consumption, unit, verified and source.

2.     We then need to prepare a billing report and this for me really starts to show the value of the data. For me though, it can be very ‘painful’ and a tough process for everyone but it will start to build a good story. I have found from experience that once we start to review the billing, we then start to understand many other areas.

Please refer to my personal works on R.E.C where we focus on Rate, Estimation and Contract. We often find some other minor billing issues like duplications or no bills. We could even find a significant correction of billing.

3.     Lastly we start to analyse the Total Energy Consumption (TEC) and the Significant Energy Consumption (SEC). This is a successful process to follow.   (This has been taken from ESOS the UK legislation) but I feel that this does work very well here. We should always plan to assess 90% of the organisations TEC. The 90% then becomes your SEC. Once you start to graph this you will understand why.

Once this data has been finalised, which could take some considerable time, I would then sit down with your sponsor and arrange to have this all signed off and agreed.

This now covers off “Data collection” which was our challenge because gathering this data will not be easy. The organisation may not be that organised and may not have the data you need (at this time). Going forward, this is a process you are going to put into the organisations  ‘Action Plan’ to focus them of the energy consumptions and costs. Therefore following years this will not be a challenge.

Profile 

This has come from a chapter of my book ‘Chapter 4 - Energy Profiling’ because it covers over the process very well. I have created a many tools over my many years of carrying out this work which will be shared within this training program.

Energy profiling is a key process. Profiling is informed by many different types of data and reports which means that it can be used in all circumstances. B2B Energy have created tools to fulfil this process, with simple Excel documents that can be manipulated to meet you own needs.

In addition, there are areas where you can upload your own tools to help the community.

The reports we have developed, and will cover are as follows:

·       Benchmarking Report based on CIBSE Guide F

·       Half-Hourly Reporting

·       Balancing Report

·       Benchmarking based on Key Performance Indicators

·       Monthly Reports (Trends)

·       Annual Charts

·       Gas Analysis Using Regression

My Tip

We cannot manage what we do not measure … so here is where we start to ‘teach’ the orgnisation’ to measure and we provide them ‘Visibility’ which will show them the benefits.