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Total Energy Management: Reduce Energy Costs and Improve Profits
With the growing emphasis on sustainability in the business landscape, energy management is quickly becoming a non-negotiable for companies worldwide.
Total energy management (TEM) is a newer approach to procuring, managing, and maintaining energy in your business unit. According to this approach, you can create a custom energy program tailored to your needs and aligned with your sustainability objectives.
More importantly, this approach can maximize your savings from energy-efficient equipment and improve your company's environmental impact by letting you design and steer your enemy management program.
This article will break down the benefits and best practices for building your own TEM strategy.
4 key steps required in Total Energy Management
Total Energy Management aims to optimize energy use to meet your business goals and sustainability targets. A TEM program covers four main aspects of energy management: auditing, conservation, generation, and procurement.
Let’s break down each of these four aspects and help you create your TEM framework:
Energy Auditing and Measurement
An energy audit is conducted to assess your building’s energy efficiency levels. This audit analyzes your current energy consumption and compares it against the minimum energy usage necessary for keeping your business functional—calculating your total energy efficiency.
So, the first step essentially involves two main tasks:
Identifying energy consumption patterns
Start by measuring your current consumption value and patterns. This will help map the scope for minimizing energy usage and cutting costs by incorporating renewable energy sources in different areas.
Setting energy consumption benchmarks
The next step is researching to determine your ideal energy consumption benchmarks. These numbers will be what you aspire to achieve through your TEM program.
Energy Conservation and Efficiency
In the next step, you have to focus on maximizing your energy efficiency and conservation values.
Conservation accounts for the energy you'll cut from your current usage and replace it with other energy sources. On the other hand, efficiency refers to the energy you can save by changing your operational practices to reduce consumption.
Here are two ways to reach your energy conservation and efficiency goals:
Implementing energy-saving measures
Factor in your energy consumption audit and create daily guidelines to save more energy. You can either replace your current equipment with energy-efficient tools or institute new operational workflows that don't consume too much energy.
Monitoring energy consumption
You should track your energy consumption consistently to maintain optimal efficiency levels and conserve maximum energy. Track any anomalies to recognize any energy-consuming activities early on and stay in complete control of your energy consumption.
Energy Generation and Renewable Energy
Besides measuring and maintaining your energy levels, your TEM program allows you to plan for in-house energy generation and adopt renewable energy sources. This is another crucial solution for minimizing consumption: building your own energy supply and relying on self-generated energy.
Follow these steps to finalize your energy generation plans:
Exploring energy generation options
Not every business can afford to generate its own energy. So, start by exploring potential options to generate energy in-house and the necessary investment. Talk to vendors and look at other businesses successfully generating energy in-house before getting started.
Investing in renewable energy sources
Even if you can't generate energy alone, you can replace existing energy sources with renewable ones. Meet your energy demand with a fully renewable setup and significantly reduce your consumption levels.
Energy procurement and supply management
The final aspect of your TEM framework is the procurement and supply management workflow. You must clearly establish your procurement process to streamline energy supply from one or more vendors. Use an energy management system to organize all the information systematically and maintain transparency with your suppliers.
Here are two crucial steps involved in this part:
Managing energy contracts and procurement
Your procurement process is one of the most important pieces of your TEM puzzle. Create a seamless procurement flow with clearly defined steps—from vendor selection and paperwork to invoicing—to avoid any mistakes in the sourcing process.
Managing energy supply risks
Pay close attention to the global energy market to identify and analyze energy-related risks in real time. This will prepare you to mitigate these threats and minimize the damage in an adverse situation.
4 core benefits of Total Energy Management
Still not convinced that you need a TEM strategy?
Here are four benefits of following this approach for your energy management program:
- Reduced energy costs: A TEM framework actively checks and reduces your energy consumption, effectively minimizing your electricity and utility bills. By letting you decide your energy consumption patterns—from small bulbs to heavy machinery, TEM increases the scope of conservation and cost reduction.
- Increased energy efficiency: The main purpose of a TEM strategy is to optimize your consumption levels across daily and weekly needs. It eliminates all inefficiencies in your operations and makes your building more energy-efficient.
- Improved environmental performance: By taking the necessary steps to reduce energy wastage and control consumption, you can positively impact the surrounding nature. It helps reduce greenhouse emissions and promotes renewable energy to meet your needs.
- Enhanced reputation and brand image: Lastly, a TEM strategy builds your reputation as a sustainable business. This brand image can work in your favor and win buyers' trust.
Implementing total energy management in your organization
Here are the exact steps you need to implement the TEM approach in your organization:
Setting energy management goals and targets
First order of business: establish your energy management goals. This will require meticulous research and analysis to identify your TEM program's top priorities. You have to understand the issues and challenges in your existing setup to create a robust TEM program.
But invest your time in preliminary research and energy surveys to start on the right note and create realistic targets for your team.
Developing an energy management plan
You can draw out your energy management plan with a list of goals. Cover all bases to determine the main steps you want to take to optimize your energy consumption. Make this plan actionable and result-driven by allocating different roles to every team member.
Measuring and reporting on energy performance
Once the plan is live and in action, remember to monitor your progress consistently. Design automated workflows to review your performance and keep checking these reports to map the scope for improvement.
How Facilio helps with total energy management
Creating and executing your own total energy management framework is time-consuming and overwhelming for many. With an IoT-powered platform like Facilio, it can be a smooth and efficient process.
Facilio helps you meet and exceed your energy management goals with real-time performance analytics, powerful custom-made reporting, and visualized heatmaps.
All these features give you a 360-degree insight into your energy consumption and what more you can do to reach optimal levels. Add to this equation Facilio's ML-driven models to diagnose equipment troubles, and you can decode your energy charts effortlessly.
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