Get your business ‘energy fit’ for 2023

There’s probably never been a more important time for businesses, charities, and public sector organisations to get ‘energy fit’.

The government’s new Energy Bills Discount Scheme will scale back support for most non-domestic users from April, which makes it doubly important for businesses to kick-start an energy health check to drive any available efficiency gains.  

For many organisations, particularly small and medium sized enterprises, these opportunities can often be hiding in plain sight – but if you don’t monitor and measure effectively, you’ll never know.

The good news is that there are lots of tools and technologies available to help.

We asked David Sing, Managing Director of Energy Assets Metering & Data, for his top tips for SMEs:

1. Make sure your premises benefit from automated meter reading systems (or a SMETS2 smart meter if you’re a micro business). These collect and transmit half-hourly consumption data, which not only means you get accurate information, you’ll also only pay for energy at time of use, with no more estimated bills.

• This is an obvious one, but – measure your energy consumption. You can use an automatic monitoring and targeting system, such as WebAnalyser, to track consumption at every meter point across the organisation. Then you’ll be able to run reports on meter points across selected periods, ranging from a single day through to several years, building a complete picture of how you’re using energy.

• Set key performance indicators (KPIs). You can incorporate KPIs into your site’s profile on WebAnalyser, meaning you can review actual performance against benchmarks…and spot the impact of efficiency actions or flag areas for concern.
  
• Set alerts – don’t be caught out by the unexpected. With the cost of energy so high, it’s critical to spot anomalies as soon as possible. For example, if you run a standard working week of Monday to Friday, set an alert that flags any unexpected consumption at the weekends, which could indicate that equipment is not being turned off at the end of the working day on a Friday. Using WebAnalyser you can set alarms for each meter for ‘Over Limit’, ‘Under Limit’ and for period-based ‘Consumption’. Over Limit and Under Limit alarms will be triggered for each half hour period if the specified threshold is exceeded or isn’t met.
  
• Investigate new, smart artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools, such as AMR DNA. This tool is particularly good at doing the heavy lifting when it comes to data interrogation, consumption pattern recognition and analysing peer-groups of buildings. It can spot energy waste by historical analysis of half-hourly meter data. When primed with meter data, weather data and occupancy forecasts, this helps optimise energy performance by implementing data-led energy waste and carbon reduction strategies. And because machine learning is smart, it’ll progressively ‘learn’ what best performance looks like – and will even produce a prioritised ‘to-do’ action list.

To find out more about how to get your business energy fit for 2023 by clicking here.

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