How to audit your business energy consumption

The energy auditing process

Successful energy audits follow these four steps:

1. Assess your current energy use
2. Conduct a site walk round
3. Develop an action plan
4. Present your business case

Conducting an energy audit using this process will help you identify all energy saving opportunities across your organisation. It will also help you to prioritise your opportunities, and where necessary, secure the support and funding you need to make them happen.

Assess your current energy use

Getting a clear picture of where and how you use energy will help you to focus your audit on the key areas of your organisation, for example, identifying areas that use the most energy.

Once you start to implement energy reduction projects, this information will enable you to clearly demonstrate to managers and staff the savings you have achieved. Our free energy usage tracker will help you to better understand energy use in your organisation, providing a simple way to collate your energy meter readings and oil purchase figures and to analyse energy consumption against your KPIs. Your energy provider may be able to help you with this kind of analysis.

Assessing your energy use will arm you with information to guide the next stage of the energy auditing process.

Conduct a site walk round

Having a clear framework for your site walk round will ensure that you cover everything you need to during your energy audit. To help you achieve this, we have created a downloadable energy audit checklist for you to use.

This checklist will allow you to audit all areas of your organisation to identify and prioritise the best places to save energy and money. You can choose which sections of this checklist apply to your organisation.

How to use the checklist

Use the checklist to conduct a systematic walk round of each area of your organisation, inspecting the processes and equipment which use energy, and making note of any potential saving opportunities.

It is important to cover as much of the organisation as is possible. This can help you identify smaller savings opportunities that can be quickly implemented, making it easier to get your colleagues on board. Opportunities that may not be a priority can be re-assessed at a later stage.

Before beginning your site walk round, make sure you have access to all areas and equipment that you need to inspect. For some organisations, it will be useful to conduct more than one walk round, to gauge usage at different times of the day or at different stages in your processes.

Develop an action plan

Having completed your site walk round, you are ready to develop your action plan.

To do this, you need to quantify the potential savings from each of your identified opportunities. You can do your own calculations using estimated energy savings and calorific values (the amount of energy per unit for any given fuel, costs and carbon factors), or by engaging with equipment suppliers and installers.

By comparing potential savings with estimated costs for the work, you can calculate payback times for each potential project and begin to prioritise actions for implementation.

Our free energy audit action plan template will help you to do this.

Present your business case

Once you have developed your action plan, it is likely that there will be no-cost and low-cost projects that you can begin to implement.

Some projects will likely require finance before work can commence and savings can be achieved.

A simple write up of your recommendations in an energy audit report is often sufficient to secure internal funds. This report could include:

1. Summary
   • A brief introduction to the survey, its results and identified opportunities
2. Introduction
   • Energy, environmental and cost baselines
   • Comparison of baseline figures against available benchmarks or internal performance indicators/targets
     • Any organisation and context specific issues to be kept in mind when considering report recommendations

3. Survey findings
   • Detailed discussion of findings, broken down wither by area or by technology theme (for example lighting and heating)
4. Recommendations
   • Actions to be taken, including technical project description if applicable
   • Estimated savings
   • Expected costs
   • Grants and incentives identified
   • Non-energy benefits
   • Potential risks and alternative options
   • Payback periods and possibly internal rates of return
   • Next steps
5. Appendices
   • Energy prices and energy data which are not included in the main body of the report
   • Data gathered during the survey (this could be links rather than data)
   • Detailed calculations of savings and costs if needed
   • Any other relevant information

A more formal business case may be required, particularly if you’re applying for finance from external sources.

Financing your projects

Accessing finance is often key for SMEs looking to implement energy efficiency projects, see our below guides for more information.

• Read more on funding to reduce your business energy costs here.
• Read how to develop a case for your resource efficiency projects here.

Finding further savings

Conducting an energy audit should not be viewed as a one-off event.

The best way to continually improve your organisation’s performance and reduce energy costs is to conduct audits at regular intervals.

If you are new to energy saving, you may want to focus on delivering the quick wins identified in your initial audit.

This is a great way to build momentum for your energy saving initiatives and allows you to build the confidence of senior management – which in turn can unlock support and finance for larger projects.

Once you have started to realise the benefits of your quick wins you can look to more advanced projects which will realise bigger savings. The guides listed below will help you to identify and implement further savings.

Further support

For further support or information please click here.