Why is Energy Management Important For Businesses?

Effectively managing the energy your business consumes is more important than ever with energy prices at record highs, the wider cost of living crisis and increasing pressure to minimise global warming. With this in mind, businesses need to ensure they’re doing everything they can to control their utility costs, the energy they consume and associated carbon impact, and ensure they deliver a more sustainable future (especially when customers are now much more conscious about the environment and how businesses are minimising their impact). Unfortunately, not all businesses have thorough energy management procedures in place. But if you are looking to get to grips with your businesses energy management, this article will help you understand the importance of it in great detail.

So, why is energy management important for businesses? Business Energy Management is important because it allows you to reduce your business costs, limit risk, minimise carbon emissions and assist ensure a more sustainable, long term future for the organisation. Not only does this help the bottom line, it reduces your greenhouse gas emissions and enhances your corporate social responsibility.

Read on to find out more about business energy management and the benefits it could bring to your company.

Is Energy Management Important For All Businesses?

In short, the answer is yes. Business energy management is important for all companies, regardless of their size. If you don’t take energy management into account across your day-to-day operations, it will result in a reduction in bottom line profits, higher carbon emissions and an increased environmental impact and leave you exposed to more risk factors in the future. Energy management is the key to avoiding these unnecessary impacts.

How do I improve Energy Management?

There are lots of ways to improve how you management your energy, and here at Boxfish, we’d suggest the following list as a good starting point:

Complete an energy audit – Undertake an energy audit to identify where you’re using energy and work out how much this costs is a great starting point. Once you know where you’re using energy and how much this is costing the business, you can start to look at relevant actions to take that will help reduce consumption, minimise spend and reduce your carbon impact..
Switch energy supplier or switch to a green tariff – Shopping around will help you find the right contracts for your business and if you haven’t switched suppliers in a while you may be paying more than you need to be. Remember that while the unit rates are important, you can improve other aspects two by speaking to alternative suppliers e.g. better customer service, free smart meters, other value added services.
Upgrade to modern energy efficient equipment. Hopefully, the energy audit will have highlighted some opportunities to improve consumption and while examples will vary, common quick wins would be areas such as replacing old style lighting to modern LED equivalents (these can use over 75% less energy) or upgrading inefficient gas boilers to modern alternatives such as air-source heat-pumps.
Purchase energy-efficient office equipment – remember that energy management also includes checking and validating that your utility invoices are also correct. Often, these will be estimates or include errors made by the suppliers which can result in increased costs being incurred. Reviewing and ensuring that each charge and line item matches up to your actual consumption is a key aspect of energy management to ensure your payments are correct.

For more information on these strategies, or for tips on how to improve on your businesses energy management, contact BoxFish. You can also look at our latest blog, “8 Tips to Reduce Office Energy Consumption” here.

This can be done in house if you have sufficient resources and the technical know-how but unfortunately many organisations, especially SME’s, don’t have either and so outsourcing this important service to an organisation like Boxfish can deliver significant benefits. With close to 30 years experience of helping our clients procure, manage and minimise their energy, we have both the in-depth, multidisciplinary expertise and resource at scale, to ensure we can provide a cost effective, value adding energy management service.

Business Energy Management Strategies

At Boxfish, we understand the importance of putting business energy management strategies in place, but when it comes down to it, tracking and optimising your business energy consumption units may require some guidance, even if you aren’t new to the world of business energy management. Putting things in place can sometimes change the operations of your business, but we are here to help.

In the below, we have listed clear 5 step strategies you can use to help with your business energy management.

Identify and Monitor Sources of Energy Consumption – This will most likely require ongoing monitoring, to identify which sources use the most energy consumption in your business..

Collect Utility Bill Data – Your utility invoices contain a large amount of data which can be collated over time, so it’s best to start gathering this information as soon as possible.

Analyse Your Meter Data – Analysing your metering data will help you to look deeper into how energy is being used in your business.

Identify Opportunities – This is a crucial step in your business energy management. By understanding what time of the day or which days of the week energy consumption is the highest, proactive steps can be taken to reduce costs for the business.

Track The Progress – This is another strategy which will be ongoing. Tracking the difference between your old and new ways of energy usage will be making sure that what you are doing for your business energy management is actually effective.

For an indepth look into these business energy management steps, you can read our latest blog, What Are 5 Strategies For Business Energy Management? where, in great detail, we look at how you can reduce your business costs.

How Can Boxfish Help Your Business?

Boxfish can provide your business expert advice when it comes to your business energy management. We can assist you in taking the correct steps to reduce your carbon footprint, which will also positively impact your business. Give our expert team a shout and we’ll take it from there – use the contact form below or give us a call on 0141 226 8525.