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Watt’s in a word?

Energy has been at the forefront of thinking for many organisations over recent times and is set to stay there for the foreseeable future. Up until this year, for most typical ‘non energy intensive’ organisations, energy accounts for less the 1% of their total operational costs, so why all the fuss?

Climate change is of course a major driver and the need to reduce carbon dioxide and other emissions into the atmosphere. Successive global and national initiatives have looked to apply targets with a view to adjusting commercial and domestic behaviour or infrastructure to meet these aims.

In the UK, the last three years has seen revisions of Building Regulations and a series of new requirements come into force, including Energy Performance Certificates (EPC), Display Energy Certificates (DECs), the Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Scheme (CRC) and potentially mandatory greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reporting, to highlight but four of the three letter acronyms in place!

These regulations have in turn been supported by various grants, incentives and initiatives for organisations to consider energy reduction, better management and/or the use of renewable technology. All of this to be complied with or changed for just 1% of turnover? May be we need to consider it differently?

Perhaps it’s less about short-term cost and more about long-term security or consistency of supply. What ever your personal opinions of climate change, the UK is and has been an importer of energy raw materials since 2005 and we will run out of coal, gas and oil at some point in the not too distant future as well as:

• we will lose up to 33% of our generating capacity by 2020,
• demand by 2030 is predicted to rise at between 17% and 30% and
• interruption in supply becoming a real possibility.

So is the cost of energy rising to substantially more than just that 1%?

The saving grace is our current energy generating and distribution system is potentially 66% inefficient, so for every watt we save individually, nationally we save three watts. What we need to add to this is effective management, that is not just energy metering and reducing usage, but understanding where it goes, how resilient the services it powers are to loss of that power. Also what alternatives may be needed to offset these losses should they occur. This requires more than just noting a few readings on a spreadsheet.

Written by Greg Davies, Head of Service Development, Assurity Consulting

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