Step 2.6 Identify and prioritize energy opportunities
Once your organization’s significant energy uses are identified, your energy team can more effectively identify opportunities for improving energy performance. Potential energy performance improvement opportunity projects or activities should focus on the things that have the largest impact on energy consumption and costs. These projects can be as simple as an awareness campaign focused on changing workplace behavior, or as complex as a capital intensive system redesign.
The energy team should take the lead in identifying these opportunities, although personnel at all levels of your organization can be engaged with identifying energy performance improvement opportunities. In addition to your organization’s personnel, good sources of ideas for energy performance improvement opportunities include utility providers, vendors and contractors.
Advancing from Foundational Level 1 to ISO 50001 Level 2 for Step 2.6
The process for identifying energy opportunities is similar for ISO 50001 (Level 2) as it is for foundational energy management (Level 1). Your organization can use energy assessments, employee suggestions, utility representatives or many other sources for opportunity identification. For ISO 50001, the opportunities must be recorded and the prioritization process is typically more formal. You develop criteria and uniformly apply them to prioritize the opportunities in accordance with your organization’s needs and strategic considerations. Your organization must also review the opportunities and their prioritization on a regular basis. Once opportunities are addressed and completed, lower priority opportunities are moved up the list. New opportunities are also prioritized and added to the list in a process of continuous opportunity identification.
There are a number of resources available to help you identify energy opportunities to pursue at your organization. To start, you should consider your organization’s significant energy uses (SEUs) that you identified in Step 2.5. Often, the best opportunities to improve energy performance are associated with your organization’s largest SEUs. To identify specific energy performance improvement opportunities, consider the following resources:
Coworkers: Your fellow employees, who often know the significant energy using equipment best, can be an excellent source of opportunities. Consider reaching out to employees through a formal suggestion system, annual performance reviews, or even informally. Communicating the importance of energy performance to the organization is re-enforced when everyone is involved with identifying opportunities for improvement.
Utility and equipment vendors: Your utility is often a great place to contact for specific resources, technologies, or programs that can help you improve your organization’s energy performance. Also, your equipment vendors often have helpful recommendations that can help maximize and sustain equipment operating efficiency.
Online resources: Consider searching the web for materials that could be helpful in identifying energy opportunities at your organization. Try a number of different searches with different search terms and browse through the results for anything particularly relevant to your organization. Some of the most useful online resources are listed in the “Resources & Examples” section in this step.
Software tools: There are many software tools devoted to helping organizations identify energy performance improvement opportunities. Many of these tools, which can range from simple to complex, are available online at no cost. Through its Energy Resource Center, DOE offers a number of free tools including system-specific tools focused on steam, process heating, compressed air, motor, pump, and fan systems. Also consider downloading the Plant Energy Profiler tool, which helps identify how energy is being purchased and consumed at a manufacturing plant and identifies potential energy and cost savings. For buildings, a large number of free tools are available at the Building Energy Software Tools Directory and other resources are available at the Commercial Buildings Resource Database.
Energy audits or assessments: Energy audits are comprehensive reviews conducted by trained professionals to identify potential energy savings opportunities. Many small and medium-sized manufacturing plants may be eligible to receive no-cost assessments by contacting the DOE Industrial Assessment Centers. Manufacturing plants can also contact a DOE trained qualified specialist or other qualified professional to conduct a facility assessment. If you are looking to identify opportunities in buildings, you can refer to the DOE publication A Guide to Energy Audits for more details on conducting an audit of your building.
The process of identifying and later prioritizing energy opportunities should be an ongoing activity of the energy team. To help keep track of your organization’s potential energy performance improvement projects, consider using the Energy Project List spreadsheet or a similar tool.
2.6.2 Establish and apply criteria for prioritizing opportunities
It's helpful to prioritize the list of energy opportunities that you identify according to a set of criteria appropriate for your organization. There are many factors you can consider to help you prioritize energy opportunities for implementation, but in general you may want to prioritize your opportunities by 1) Feasibility and ease of implementation, 2) Implementation cost, and 3) Impact on energy performance. Often, many plants identify and prioritize easily implemented no-cost/low-cost operational energy savings—or “low-hanging fruit”. Other considerations that you may want to keep in mind while prioritizing opportunities include impacts on the bottom-line, corporate and legal requirements, age of current equipment, and supplier considerations. Establishing and applying consistent and impartial criteria will help ensure that truly impactful opportunities are selected later on in Step 2.10.
Try to update your list of energy opportunities at regular intervals.
Resources & Examples
DOE Energy Footprint Tool: This tool helps you organize your organization’s energy related data. The Energy Footprint Tool allows you to enter data on a monthly basis for up to 10 years for a variety of variables.
DOE Industrial Technical Assistance Programs: Supports the deployment of manufacturing technologies and practices, including strategic energy management and combined heat and power, across American industry to increase productivity and reduce water and energy use.
EPA ENERGY STAR Guidelines for Energy Management: Contains a step-by-step road map for continuous improvement, based on best practices as compiled by the EPA ENERGY STAR Program. Refer to Step 2.5 and Appendix 5 of the ENERGY STAR Guidelines for guidance specific to eGuide Step 2.6.
Energy Management Package for Small Commercial Buildings: Best practices guide and energy management package for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) contractors to deliver energy management services to small commercial buildings. Refer to Element E3 of the Package for guidance specific to eGuide Step 2.6.
Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) Energy MAP: SEAI’s Energy MAP tool provides a step-by-step guide to creating a best practice action plan for energy management. Refer to Step 9 of the SEAI Energy MAP for helpful guidance specific to eGuide Step 2.6.
DOE Buildings Performance Database: This database is the largest dataset of real building performance data, which allows for a comparison of energy performance trends among similar buildings and helps in identifying and prioritizing energy performance improvement opportunities.
EPA ENERGY STAR Financial Calculators: These tools can help guide financial decisions about energy efficiency and meet your energy performance goals.
Advanced Energy Retrofit Guides: These DOE-developed guides can help decision makers plan, design, and implement energy improvement projects in their facilities. There are guides currently available for office buildings, retail buildings, grocery stores, K-12 schools, and healthcare facilities.
Commercial Building Energy Asset Scoring Tool: The Commercial Building Energy Asset Score is a national standard for a voluntary energy rating system evaluating the physical characteristics of your building as built and its overall energy efficiency independent of occupancy and operational choices.
A Guide to Energy Audits: Prepared by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, this guide provides a detailed review of energy audits for commercial buildings.
Small Building Re-Tuning Resources: This page shows a number of useful resources to help re-tune small (<100,000 sf) commercial buildings without building automation systems, developed by researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Interactive Manufacturing Plant Tool: Prepared by the U.S. EPA ENERGY STAR® program, this interactive tool shows you where you can save energy in industrial buildings and manufacturing plants. The tool contains quick tips on how you can maintain motors, tune boilers, educate staff, and more to reduce your organization's energy costs.
Energy Treasure Hunt Guide: Prepared by the U.S. EPA ENERGY STAR® program, this guide is a dynamic and effective process for identifying savings opportunities and building stronger energy teams.
Building Upgrade Manual: Prepared by the U.S. EPA ENERGY STAR® program, this resource is a practical guide to help plan and achieve profitable improvements to buildings.
Manufacturing Industry Energy Guides: Prepared by the U.S. EPA ENERGY STAR® program, these guides identify energy efficiency opportunities in a wide range of manufacturing industries such as food processing, motor vehicle manufacturing and refineries. There is also a guide specifically targeted at small and medium-sized manufacturers.
Industrial Assessment Center (IACs): Small- and medium-sized manufacturers may be eligible to receive a no-cost assessment provided by DOE Industrial Assessment Centers (IACs).
IAC Database: The Industrial Assessment Centers (IAC) Database is a collection of all the publicly available assessment and recommendation data. This includes information on the type of facility assessed (size, industry, energy usage, etc.) and details of resulting recommendations (type, energy, and dollars savings). The Top 10 IAC database energy saving recommendations are shown here: http://iac.rutgers.edu/database/topten/.
Plant Energy Profiler: The Plant Energy Profiler, or PEP, is an online software tool provided by the U.S. Department of Energy to help industrial plant managers in the United States identify how energy is being purchased and consumed at their plant and identify potential energy and cost savings.
Building Energy Software Tools Directory: Shows tools for whole building analysis, codes & standards materials, components, equipment, and systems, and other applications.
DOE Energy Resource Center: Contains a number of tools developed by the DOE Advanced Manufacturing Office, including system-specific tools for identifying energy opportunities in industrial plants:
