The con­cept of an energy man­ager is elu­sive to most peo­ple.  Orga­ni­za­tions are exposed to the risks and oppor­tu­ni­ties of energy use sim­ply by open­ing their doors in the morn­ing.  For starters, it is NOT sim­ply chas­ing after peo­ple to get them to turn lights off.  Energy rep­re­sents value that can be con­sumed, saved, invested, and used to cre­ate new value. Like any form of wealth, energy should be shel­tered from risk.  If you think of energy as wealth, you think of fuels and power as forms of cur­rency.  Energy can be man­aged using the same plan­ning tech­niques that are used to man­age cash, secu­ri­ties, and other forms of wealth.  Add to this the cur­rent array of energy-related rebates, tax incen­tives, and emerg­ing demand for sus­tain­able prod­ucts and ser­vices, and true busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties become read­ily apparent.

Energy impacts are not lim­ited to the boiler room.  Everyone—from the CEO to the recep­tion­ist to the pro­cure­ment direc­tor–  has a hand in shap­ing util­ity bills now and for years to come.  The lat­est util­ity bill received by your busi­ness or work­place reflects choices made one month ago, a year ago, and maybe even 20 years ago.  Yet energy costs are only half the story.  Effi­cient use of elec­tric­ity not only cuts power plant emis­sions, it reduces stress on the power dis­tri­b­u­tion grid.  Any efforts to improve the effi­ciency of direct com­bus­tion of gas or oil con­tribute to occu­pant safety.  By won­der­ful coin­ci­dence, those same ini­tia­tives pro­vide relief for oper­at­ing bud­gets.  On one level, a cli­mate action plan addresses the emis­sions that con­tribute to adverse cli­mate impacts.  But it can also be a busi­ness plan to iden­tify and pri­or­i­tize the actions that con­tribute to sus­tain­able oper­a­tions in BOTH senses of the word: envi­ron­men­tal and fiscal.

Every­one under­stands the fis­cal con­straints imposed by a bad econ­omy.  That real­ity gives any organization—government or business—another way to look at energy waste.  It imposes a fis­cal drain just like a value-added tax.  Every per­son work­ing in an orga­ni­za­tion has an oppor­tu­nity to reduce that waste, which adds directly to the bot­tom line.  One dol­lar in avoided energy waste adds one full dol­lar of oper­at­ing income.  Sure, there’s sim­ple things like turn­ing off fix­tures when they’re not needed.  But the dol­lars you spend on energy go deeper than that.  It reflects the impact of rou­tine main­te­nance (or deferred main­te­nance) such as air fil­ter replace­ment and tun­ing up the com­bus­tion on fur­naces, boil­ers and water heaters.  It reflects the selec­tion of light fix­tures that were opti­mized for reduc­ing the glare on CRT com­puter mon­i­tors from the 1990s that have long since been replaced by LCD flat-screen mon­i­tors.  It’s reflected in the col­lec­tion of mini-refrigerators that are not only one-third full, they are located under a ther­mo­stat that con­trols air con­di­tion­ing.  It reflects habits and pro­ce­dures set years ago by main­te­nance staff—choices that made per­fect sense at a time when energy was cheap.  But as the cost of energy rises, the trade-off among time, effort, and money changes.  Show me a facil­ity where main­te­nance staff do not see the util­ity bills, and I’ll show you a facil­ity that does not evolve its pro­ce­dures and pri­or­i­ties accord­ingly in response to ris­ing energy prices.

This is what energy man­agers do:  bench­mark facil­ity per­for­mance over time, pri­or­i­tize oppor­tu­ni­ties to make energy improve­ments, and max­i­mize the col­lec­tion of rebates and incen­tives that sup­port invest­ment in new energy-saving tech­nolo­gies.  Smart energy deci­sions made today can off­set future energy waste, and ensure that future rev­enues are devoted to more pro­duc­tive pur­poses.  In the end, energy man­age­ment con­tributes to a triple bot­tom line of eco­nomic, envi­ron­men­tal, and soci­etal goals.

Christo­pher Russell