GUIDELINES FOR AN INTEGRATED ENERGY STRATEGY
Helping companies achieve their sustainable energy objectives
How to collaborate with your suppliers, customers and employees
Stage 1: identify and assess options
The steps below outline how to identify and assess options for collaboration with your supplier and customers as well as with your employees across the three areas.
Engaging with your workforce and value chain partners to improve energy efficiency
- Identify where in the value chain you can make energy consumption more efficient or where you can avoid energy waste through changes in decision-making and behavior.
- Carry out a stakeholder mapping exercise to identify groups that have the most influence or impact on the energy consumption you are targeting. Engage with high-influence and high-impact stakeholder groups to understand their perceptions and motivations and get their insights into opportunities to improve energy efficiency.
- Define the energy efficiency problem in behavioral terms (what is the behavior, where is it performed and who is doing it), specify the target (desired) behavior and then identify what needs to change.
- Identify and evaluate activities that will improve energy efficiency. Activities could include policy changes, communications, reporting, incentives, penalties or the provision of training, tools and resources.
- Define the business need and the desired outcome from the overall engagement initiative and the proposed activities. Use that to work backward to confirm which type of suppliers/partners to evaluate.
Using smart controls to improve energy and fuel efficiency
- Start by clearly defining the problem that you are trying to solve through smart technology. The problem could be that you don’t know where your company is wasting energy or that you know that your company is using energy inefficiently, but you don’t know why.
- Once you have defined the problem, define the barriers that are stopping you from addressing it. This will help you confirm whether smart controls can solve these problems by improving system performance visibility and enabling automated controls.
- Define the business need and the desired outcome from investing in smart controls to optimize energy efficiency. Use that to work backward to confirm which type of technologies and suppliers/partners to evaluate.
Upgrading and replacing equipment and assets to improve energy efficiency
- Prioritize the highest energy-consuming equipment and assets and evaluate their life cycle cost to help define the problem that you’re looking to solve.
- Work with suppliers of high energy-consuming equipment and assets and make sure they’re clear on the breakdown of the cost of energy, other consumables, operation and maintenance.
- Work with customers to improve your understanding of how they’re using your product or service and the energy implications it has for them. Understand how they use energy at their facilities and identify where you can help them advance energy efficiency improvements.
- Identify suitable financing options to fund equipment replacement, including self-funding, lease financing and equity finance. Identify opportunities to provide (or support) suppliers or customers with finance options so they can invest in proven energy conservation measures.
- Define the business need and the desired outcome. Use that to work backward to confirm which type of technologies, financing options and suppliers/partners to evaluate.
Stage 2: select suppliers, customers and partners to work with
Determine if you should do it yourself, partner with a company in your value chain, partner with a third party (or acquire to bring a solution provider in house). Considerations for selecting a company to partner with can include:
Engaging with your workforce and value chain partners to improve energy efficiency
- Proven experience and results achieved
- Alignment of values, culture and leadership style
- Commitment to innovation and trying new ways of working
- Approach to training, developing and incentivizing people
- Communications channels and platforms available
- Availability of data and technology to enable the rapid communication of results
- Similarity to or differences with the sector the company operates in, the nature of their operations, energy use and waste and the types of activities identified
Using smart controls to improve energy and fuel efficiency
- Understanding your energy efficiency problem and evidence of experience in solving such a problem in the past
- Experience working with companies that have similar operations and energy efficiency opportunities and their ability to apply insights to improve energy performance
- The feasibility of using the same technology to solve similar energy efficiency problems
- The feasibility of integrating technology and sharing data
- Risk management and cybersecurity capabilities and frameworks, including any provisions to assume liability for data or system performance or for transferring liabilities
Upgrading and replacing equipment and assets to improve energy efficiency
- Relevance of technical expertise, experience and energy efficiency solutions
- Similarity of energy-consuming equipment and assets operated or supplied
- Potential to influence or impact the most energy-intensive components of the value chain
- Potential to attract new sources of capital to invest in energy efficiency
- Potential to co-invest in technology solutions that benefit all partners
Stage 3: pilot test
When identifying a suitable pilot project, consider the following:
- The pilot project’s representativeness of the broader energy efficiency problem you aim to tackle;
- The availability of data to set a robust baseline and evaluate the impact of the initiative;
- The availability of data to examine the impact on other operational parameters, such as productivity, and other costs, such as maintenance and other consumables;
- How climatic conditions and the time of the year influence results;
- Data ownership and data sharing arrangements.
Applicable to the specific three areas discussed in this section are the following:
Engaging with your workforce and value chain partners to improve energy efficiency
- Representativeness of the operational, behavioral and cultural context of the pilot so that results are relevant and to apply learnings to a more comprehensive engagement initiative
- Evaluation of the impact of different activities either by running multiple pilots that apply different combinations of activities or by isolating and monitoring the impact of each activity
- Length of the pilot – if it is too short or small in scale then you may miss learnings; but if it is too long, it could become difficult to manage or to wait for results
Using smart controls to improve energy and fuel efficiency
- Representativeness of the technology and control systems in place and the level of exposure to operational risks and/or cybersecurity risks
- Ease of integrating the proposed solution with existing data management processes, smart control systems, IT architecture and IT
securit y - Flexibility of the proposed solution (such as open or closed protocol, licensing arrangements) so that it is easy and cost-effective to scale up
Upgrading and replacing equipment and assets to improve energy efficiency
- Representativeness of the equipment and assets upgraded or replaced and the level of risk to operations
- Availability of monitoring equipment and data to examine the impact of energy efficiency installations on energy use
- Determine success criteria to evaluate your pilot, which typically includes evaluating for your company and partners:
- Energy, cost and carbon savings achieved;
- Improved understanding of energy-efficient practices and improved attitudes regarding the importance of energy efficiency based on survey or interview responses;
- Ease of implementation and collaboration with value chain partners;
- Operational and productivity benefits;
- Maintenance and labor benefits (for example, reducing spending on maintaining equipment or highlighting equipment that is likely to fail);
- Socio-economic benefits;
- Environmental benefits.
Stage 4: scale up
To scale up from the pilot project to a more comprehensive engagement initiative, consider the following:
- Did it have undesired or unexpected effects beyond the success criteria?
- What data was useful and helpful and what was unnecessary?
- Do you need new data or do you need to perform additional analytics with existing data?
- How can you scale up the solution by working collaboratively with other value chain partners?
- Do you need additional resource and/or technical expertise?
Engaging with your workforce and value chain partners to improve energy efficiency
- Which activities worked, which need modifying and which were unsuccessful?
Using smart controls to improve energy and fuel efficiency
- Which smart control projects worked, which need modifying and which were unsuccessful?
- Do you need new sensors or need to capture new data streams?
- How can you scale up the solution by working more collaboratively, leveraging automated processes wherever possible and reducing the need for human resources?
Upgrading and replacing equipment and assets to improve energy efficiency
- How resilient is the supply chain in providing equipment, assets and any necessary maintenance?
- Would suppliers, customers or other value chain partners notice the change that you’re making to equipment and assets, will it have negative or positive impacts on their business and how can you mitigate or leverage that impact?
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