Energy wasted equals dollars lost.
Establishing an energy team at your business (or educate your family to do at your home) to be responsible for developing projects and pushing an energy efficiency agenda can ensure that your company’s stated energy-savings goals become a reality. At each meeting, the team identifies new projects and assigns each member a task. Tasks may include investigating grants and rebates for energy saving projects, estimating potential energy savings, getting bids from contractors, or investigating new technologies. It is very important to fund their projects from the energy saving. For example if a lighting project saves 150$ a month that should be given to the Energy Team to fund future energy saving projects and thus you create a way to increasingly fund bigger and more expensive projects.
The Process
Establish a Team and maybe give it a cool name like Energy Heroes
Get Educated about energy savings https://energy.gov/energysaver/energy-saver
Review Company Energy Costs with Team to establish a baseline
Do an energy survey to list what uses energy
Walk Through with Fresh Eyes approach.
Determine Energy Savings opportunities
Evaluate options
Perform ROI (return on investment) Analysis
Implement Projects
Repeat as desired
The Bottom Line
Increasing energy costs coupled with economic downturn have forced business owners to do more with less. These days, smart business means efficient business—and energy is one of the few areas where you can cut costs without sacrificing customer service or product integrity. The tips presented here will be appropriate for almost any type of building and are a great place to start.
Some ideas of Energy Reduction that were implemented at one location:
Solartube (tubular skylight) natural day lighting
Under desk floor heating pad for the “cold” person in the office
New installation of air compressors
Lighting upgrade from Metal Halide to T8 fluorescent
Multiple air leak studies
Duct work sealing
Interior lighting upgrade from T8 fluorescent to LEDs
Create a vestibule/air lock for entering/leaving different temperature zones
Plan to shift work schedule to not use peak electricity
The manager was discussing the many benefits of a recently completed “energy efficiency” upgrade at his manufacturing plant. Notably absence from the manager’s comments were any mention of saving energy or lower utility bills.
The value of the benefits the manager described (dramatically less noise, zero loss of production, reduced maintenance, etc.) had nothing to do with energy and appeared to be far more noteworthy. These added benefits were so significant saving energy had become relatively unimportant to the client and not worth mentioning!