7 Steps To Help You Save Money And The Planet – Part 1
More and more organisations are setting a target of achieving net zero in the coming years. While this is a fantastic ambition to have, it’s one that may feel overwhelming when you look at the scale of the task in front of you.
This is precisely why we’ve created a seven-step action plan to achieve net zero. We’ve come up with these steps at Nero Energy after helping dozens of our clients set out on their journey towards net zero.
We understand that net zero is a big task, so using our tried-and-tested framework will help you to break this big ambition down into smaller, actionable steps that lead you to the end result of net zero, while helping you reduce your energy use and save money on your bills along the way.
In this blog, I’m going to explain the first three of these steps:
- Step 1: Understanding your energy use
- Step 2: Analysing your energy systems and their components
- Step 3: Assessing your building’s energy performance
Think of these as the essential fact-finding stages you need to go through in order to put together a plan that not only meets the needs of your organisation, but is cost-effective and will deliver the biggest savings both financially and in terms of your carbon footprint.
Let’s dive in…
Step 1: Understanding your energy use
This first step is all about understanding how much energy your site is using, and looking for any trends in energy use. Take the opportunity to dive deep into the data here, because it will pay dividends later on.
An example of a trend you might spot at this stage is a spike in energy use as people arrive for work around 9am. Generally speaking, if your business operates roughly 9–5 hours, you should see energy use drop off in the evening. However, when you look at the data, you might be surprised by what you find.
If you notice abnormalities, take a closer look. Is it that one team is consistently leaving the lights in their office on? Perhaps it’s that no one is switching their computers off overnight and instead leaving them in standby. These might sound like small things, but when you scale them up to an organisation with tens or hundreds of lights and computers, it quickly adds up.
In a manufacturing setting, leaving industrial machines on when they aren’t in use could be adding considerably to your energy usage and bills. The aim of this step is to get you to start thinking about the link between energy consumption and the organisation you’re running.
If you have multiple sites, or even just different departments, use this exercise to start raising awareness among people by turning it into a friendly competition. So, if you run a group of schools, could you highlight which ones use the least energy, and which have made the greatest energy savings each month? Or could you fire up some rivalry between different departments in your business by fitting metres to track energy consumption in different parts of your building?
This will drive awareness of energy usage among all the individuals working for you, and changing habits can lead to some surprisingly big gains.
Step 2: Analysing your energy systems and their components
This is when you look at the main energy systems being used in your building – usually they will be lighting, heating, cooling and other electrical equipment – and break each one down into its components to understand what changes you could make to save energy. A manufacturer would include their machinery as a separate energy system to analyse.
So, using lighting as an example, you would break down exactly what energy each individual light is using. That will include looking at the watts a light uses, how many hours it’s used each day, and how many days it’s used each month. Then you can calculate how much that light is costing. Having this data is vital to enable you to carry out a thorough comparison process when you reach Step 4.
This might sound as though you’re going into too much detail, but trust me, detail is incredibly useful! The purpose of this exercise is to find areas within each of the main energy systems that you can make more efficient.
Any school, business or government organisation will want to have light and heat. What this exercise does is enable us to find a more efficient, controllable and climate-friendly way to provide it. As well as recording the data, this stage also prompts you to start asking questions: Why do we do it like this? Is there a more efficient way of producing and using heat or light?
Step 3: Assessing your building’s energy performance
Once you have taken a deep dive into the energy systems at your premises, it’s time to look at the building itself. What is it constructed from and how efficient is it at remaining cool or warm?
We need to have a good understanding of the building’s condition before we can make recommendations for improvements. This includes finding out how much insulation it has, what condition the windows are in, and even the design and flow of the space, by which I mean the likes of open-plan versus smaller offices.
So, you might discover that it would be more efficient to heat several smaller offices than to have one, large open-plan space. A simple change, like lowering the height of the ceilings, could also mean you have less space to heat and therefore use less energy in the process.
What you are looking for here is the optimum design for your building to help it maintain a comfortable temperature and use energy efficiently. For instance, if you receive a lot of deliveries but your front door leads straight into a large, open-plan office that is heated, you’ll lose a lot of that heat (and waste a lot of energy) because the door, as it’s being opened and closed regularly throughout the day, will introduce cold air and allow hot air to escape.
You could even use thermography to assess the thermal efficiency of your building and to identify where heat loss occurs most frequently.
Use knowledge as the foundation for your plan
What we’ve covered in Steps 1–3 is all about what you already have – what is the existing state of your energy systems, energy usage and buildings? In Steps 4–7, which I’ll explore in next week’s blog, we are going to look at how you can use all of the data you’ve gathered to put together a comprehensive road map to guide your organisation towards a net-zero future.
If you’d like assistance with assessing your organisation’s energy use, or putting together a road map to lead you to net zero, book a discovery call with us today to learn more about how we can support you on this journey.
