In any facility, there are effective and ineffective energy conservation measures that can be implemented to save energy and reduce the facility energy bills. Factors that are used to determine the effective/ineffective measures are summarized below:

• The return on investment or payback period.
• The non-direct savings such as maintenance savings, materials savings, increased productivity, better safety…etc.
• The time required to implement the measure.
• The disruption to the facility operation due to the measure implementation.
• The amount of CO2 emissions avoidance by implementing the measure.
• Any risk associated with implementing the measure.

To select the effective measures to be implemented in the facility, an energy audit should be conducted and a holistic analysis to all the possible measures should be carried out taking into consideration all the factors mentioned above to decide on which measures are more effective than others. Click here for more details about energy audit.

For example, it is ineffective to replace an old water chiller with low maintenance requirements, while a fine tuning to the Building Management System (BMS) can save more energy and with much less capital cost. It is good to implement both measures but most of the time the facility owners don’t have enough budget to implement multiple measures.

Likewise, it is ineffective to replace an old water heater in an office building that has low hot water consumption rather than replacing the old lights, which are on all the day, with LED type.

Therefore, it is not a matter of just implementing any energy conservation measure to save energy and we say we are achieving the organization sustainable targets; it is a matter of analysing these measures in a smart way to decide on which measures have better return on investment and better benefits to the facility owner than the other measures to avoid wasting the money and time.

Most of the times, the facility owner and the facility staff are lacking the knowledge and the experience to conduct energy audit and holistically analyse all the possible energy conservation measures and therefore, they should hire an experienced energy consultant to carry out this analysis and advise them.

The energy analysis and the return on investment calculations that the energy consultant carries out determine which measure is more effective than the other and why we should give it priority to implement it first.

If you need a help to determine what effective energy conservation measures options you have for your facility, please don’t hesitate to contact us.