Energy:  saving electricity, gas and money

Step 1 - Know your energy bills

First steps to managing your energy more efficiently is to establish how much your organisation pays for its energy, and how much it uses. 12 months of bills can help you estimate energy consumption for future months and can establish consumption trends.

Step 2 - Know your energy contract

If your energy bills exceed $20,000, obtaining an energy contract can be the cheapest and most effective way of ensuring you pay the cheapest rates on offer. Business SA’s fee-based Compare Program service has saved an average $14,000 in electricity supply costs (including the cost of the service) for businesses using the program by doing just this!

Step 3 - Monitoring your energy bills

The next step is to look at each energy bill and record consumptive patterns using SMART indicators (Simple, Measurable, Accurate, Realistic, Time-bound). This way increases in energy efficiency can be identified, despite increases its energy consumption, during periods of expansion or high productivity.

Step 4 - Identify areas for improvement

You know your business better than anyone – so doing this should be an easy step. Using your knowledge and experiences, identify the 4-5 areas in your organisation that are the most inefficient energy users. These should be put on a hit list to address.  If you want to get a more detailed analysis, Business SA can undertake a review of your business, as a basis to provide a more detailed explanation of what should be addressed.

Step 5 - Take action

Use your imagination – options can include undertaking an energy savings campaign for your business to get staff motivated, or put a traffic light sticker system on electrical equipment as a means to identify things that should stay on all the time (i.e. computer servers) and things that can be switched off directly after use (i.e. meeting room lights).

Next steps      

To find out more information, visit our Green Accreditation Scheme page here.

Learn more about our Environment Improver Program here.

Brett Miller is a Business SA Environment and Sustainability specialist helping businesses to identify ways in which they become more sustainable.  Contact Brett via email or the Customer Service Centre on 08 8300 0103.