Big Energy Data Management

UK Government Updates ESOS Guidelines

Britain?s Environment Agency has produced an update to the ESOS guidelines previously published by the Department of Energy and Climate Change. Fortunately for businesses much of it has remained the same. Hence it is only necessary to highlight the changes here.

1. Participants in joint ventures without a clear majority must assess themselves individually against criteria for participation, and run their own ESOS programs if they comply.
2. If a party supplying energy to assets held in trust qualifies for ESOS then these assets must be included in its program.
3. Total energy consumption applies only to assets held on both the 31 December 2014 and 5 December 2015 peg points. This is relevant to the construction industry where sites may exchange hands between the two dates. The definition of ?held? includes borrowed, leased, rented and used.
4. Energy consumption while travelling by plane or ship is only relevant if either (or both) start and end-points are in the UK. Foreign travel may be voluntarily included at company discretion. The guidelines are silent regarding double counting when travelling to fellow EU states.
5. The choice of sites to sample is at the discretion of the company and lead assessor. The findings of these audits must be applied across the board, and ?robust explanations? provided in the evidence pack for selection of specific sites. This is a departure from traditional emphasis on random.

The Environment Agency has provided the following checklist of what to keep in the evidence pack

1. Contact details of participating and responsible undertakings
2. Details of directors or equivalents who reviewed the assessment
3. Written confirmation of this by these persons
4. Contact details of lead assessor and the register they appear on
5. Written confirmation by the assessor they signed the ESOS off
6. Calculation of total energy consumption
7. List of identified areas of significant consumption
8. Details of audits and methodologies used
9. Details of energy saving opportunities identified
10. Details of methods used to address these opportunities / certificates
11. Contracts covering aggregation or release of group members
12. If less than twelve months of data used why this was so
13. Justification for using this lesser time frame
14. Reasons for including unverifiable data in assessments
15. Methodology used for arriving at estimates applied
16. If applicable, why the lead assessor overlooked a consumption profile

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Article 8 of the EU Energy Efficiency Directive ? Orientation

Following in-depth discussion of the UK?s ESOS response, we decided to backtrack to the source, especially since every EU member is facing similar challenges. The core purpose of the directive is to place a pair of obligations on member states. These are

1. To promote the availability of energy audits among final customers in all sectors, and;
2. To ensure that enterprises that are not SMEs carry out energy audits at least every four years.

Given the ability for business to look twice at every piece of legislation it considers unproductive, the Brussels legislators took care to define what constitutes an enterprise larger than an SME.

Definition of a Large Undertaking

A large undertaking meets one or both of the following conditions:

1. It employs 250 or more people
2. Its annual turnover is more than ?50 million and its balance sheet total exceeds ?43 million

Rules for Energy Audits

If accredited / qualified in-house specialists are unavailable then independent experts should supervise audits. The talent shortage seems common to many EU businesses. In hindsight, the Union could have ramped up slower, especially since the first compliance date of 5 December 2015 does not leave much swing room.

ecoVaro doubts there was a viable alternative, given the urgent imperative to beat back the scourge of carbon that is threatening the viability of our planet. The legislators must have been of a similar mind when laying down the guidelines. Witness for example the requirement that penalties be ?effective, proportionate and dissuasive?.

In order to be compliant, an energy audit must

1. Be based on twelve months of verifiable data that is
   • over a continuous period beginning no more than 24 months before the beginning of the energy audit, and;
   • identifies energy saving opportunities including paths to their achievement
2. Analyse the participant’s energy consumption and energy efficiency
3. Have not been used as the basis for an energy audit in a previous compliance period

Measurement of current status and progress tracing are at the core of energy saving and good governance generally. EcoVaro has a powerhouse of software tools available on the cloud to help project teams save time and money.