For me this is the penultimate process of an energy management strategy because on completion of the profiling and the energy assessment it is critical to deliver and implement the measures found from the assessment and then leading into the last stage of Measure and Verification.
Considerable amount of time and money has been invested in carrying out the process of energy management and by focusing on the measures this will provide you with significant savings and return on investment. This is never taken into consideration, but how much time has been invested into meetings, assessments and report writing, just for that report to be sat gathering dust on a shelf or stuck in someone’s bottom draw.
Ultimately once the assessments have been carried out all the measures need to be populated into an ‘Action Plan’. This action plan will have been built into categories such as No cost, medium cost, and capital expeditor. The no cost savings will be best practice and areas which will need no technology installed or purchased. This area will be mainly behaviour process of turning lights of and the adjustment of heating and conditioning both set-points and time zone adjusting.
If from day one the correct scope has been prepared, then there is no real reason why the implementation stage is not implemented. When building a Energy Management Strategy it is really key that an objective document is produced and from here I would most certainly recommend that an Energy Policy is developed. Agreed at board level and the published. Within the Policy Clear objectives need to be presented.
Once the Policy has been signed the complete strategy can be managed and delivered from start to finish.
Implementation
This for me is the most important stage of the energy management process and in some cases this stage can be bolted on to any original strategy that was started and never finished. If we go back to 2005 I was working as a Contracts Manager for a FM, providing energy management as an interim role. I was presented with ‘Carbon Trust Reports’ which were good and thorough and though they would highlight so significant projects, the report did not discuss implementation or how they could release savings. During this time the consultant was not allowed to take these projects further. I would discuss with our clients showing them how they could implement such savings.
It does not end there, we need to review all possible measures for an organisation, group the measures and then build an Action Plan. The group will simply look like this:
- No Cost
- Medium Cost
- Capital Cost
The below graphic shows the headings for our Action Plan
Once the Action Plan has been developed regarding these categories a group meeting would needs to be arranged to review and develop a prioritisation.
Monthly review meeting to maintain that the organisation is kept on track regarding making these savings, specifically the ‘No Cost Savings’.
You will notice that we have a column called ‘Partner’ this is where the organisation and the Lead Energy Expert need to work together and find the correct partner. B2B Energy have been developing partners over many years and we go through a strict 50-point Due Diligence process to understand who the right partners are to work on these items, whether it is a technology or a service. This due diligence will be carried out along side the organisation ensuring that the partner is the best choice.
This process have been learnt from twenty years of implementing energy projects from changing a washer on a tap to installing Combined Heat and Power.
Energy Experts need to take the lead roll here to ensure that the Action Plan is delivered, there are good savings and every month there is clear communication.