I want to save electricity and costs

Want to save electricity, electricity costs and greenhouse gases in your organisation?   Here’s how.

These are some of the things you can do, to reduce electricity consumption and costs, and greenhouse gases from electricity use.

These aren’t necessarily sequential, but should be considered together because action in one area can affect the effectiveness of other actions.
For example, optimising the electricity tariff, or installing solar PV,  should take account of the potential to reduce electricity consumption.
And the potential for economically viable energy efficiency projects will be affected by the electricity tariffs (retail and network) and the option of generating your own electricity from solar, wind and biomass.

• Monitor electricity invoices, to get a better understanding of consumption and cost trends,  the breakdown of electricity use between peak and off-peak periods.
  Check the elements of the invoice, to understand the effect of electricity consumption (kWh), time of use (peak and off-peak cost), demand (kW and kVA) and other charges.
• Obtain ‘interval data’, i.e. 15-minute, 30 minute and hourly data, to understand how consumption varies by time of day, day of the week, working hours and after-hours.
  Interval data is available from energy retailers, sometimes for a fee, and sometimes for free.
  A system such as eco-tracker will automatically collect and display interval data from multiple retailers, for multiple accounts, fuels and sites, via the web.
• Evaluate retail energy prices.
• Evaluate current and alternative network tariffs.
• Determine the energy use of each item of equipment.
• Identify opportunities to reduce each of these uses of energy, and evaluate these opportunities (calculate the implementation costs, energy savings, and other costs and benefits), and prepare business cases for the opportunities which meet the organisation’s investment criteria.