For organisations across a wide range of industries understanding, managing, and reducing their business carbon emissions is becoming increasingly important. With stakeholders, consumers, and employees looking to work with a sustainable business, reducing the impact your organisation has on the planet is becoming vital to achieve commercial success.
In addition to this expectation, there are numerous Government schemes to encourage businesses in managing their energy efficiency and carbon emissions. Large UK organisations are required to comply with the Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme (ESOS) in which they must detail the total energy use of their business, identify areas of significant energy consumption, and find energy efficient solutions to reduce their consumption.
In this blog, TEAM’s Energy Consultant and ESOS Lead Assessor, Tom McLeish, will explore the role energy audits can play in supporting businesses in complying with ESOS and in creating their net zero strategy.
Starting from the ground up
Understanding your business’ energy usage is a key starting point on your journey to energy efficiency and net zero. Whether you have one office or multiple warehouses and a fleet of commercial vehicles, understanding your overall energy consumption is vital.
An energy audit can provide a detailed analysis of an organisation’s energy use across different operations and will enable you to identify cost effective energy saving solutions. One of the primary goals of an energy audit is to find areas in the business where energy consumption can be reduced, this could be simple solutions such as replacing your office lighting with LED equivalents, or implementing a behaviour change programme. It could also be plans on a larger scale, like replacing your diesel commercial vehicles with an electric equivalent.
Overall, audits provide solutions to problem areas that will reduce overall consumption and in turn your business carbon emissions.
Supporting your ESOS compliance
As part of ESOS, businesses in scope must conduct an energy audit every four years. However, by using your energy audit as more than just a legal tick box, businesses can gain insights into how they want to tackle their net zero transition. Energy audits provide a solid foundation that can both help achieve ESOS compliance and support net zero planning.
An ESOS audit will measure and understand the energy consumption of a business’ industrial processes, buildings and transport and how this is used within the organisation. The audit will then identify cost-effective measures to improve energy efficiency, leading to significant energy and cost savings and the reduction of a business’ carbon emissions.
Although this energy audit is a mandatory requirement for businesses in scope for the Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme, the insights found can be very valuable. By utilising the energy audits required of ESOS, businesses can understand their energy consumption and waste, save money and energy within their business estate, and establish plans for a sustainable future.
Facilitating Net Zero Planning
For many organisations, the pressure to reduce their carbon emissions is growing. However, for many businesses knowing where to start in their net zero planning can prove to be an overwhelming task.
Unfortunately for organisations planning their net zero transition, it is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Every organisation has a unique set of issues, and although it may feel easy to sit and strategize your future plans, getting out and about in your building’s estate will enable you to understand its consumption more, giving you the insights required to create a successful net zero strategy tailored to your organisation.
By conducting and understanding an organisation’s current energy use, identifying areas that could be improved upon, and harnessing the data found, businesses will have a strong foundation to begin their transition to net zero.
Even if the business does not fall into scope for ESOS, regular energy audits can enable organisations to continue to gain insights and understand their current energy use, identify areas that require improvement and harness that data to plan their sustainability targets.
Achieving your net zero goals
Through utilising energy audits, businesses can prioritise the implementation of energy saving projects, reduce unnecessary consumption and meet Government led compliance schemes, like ESOS.
Energy audits and surveys can act as a one stop shop for understanding the basics of your energy use. Getting started with net zero does not have to be complicated. By using audits as tools, they can not only help identify inefficiencies but also pave the way for actionable steps towards achieving net zero emissions.
