CIET's Ask Us Anything series is a free monthly Q&A session with industry experts.
In our Ask Us Anything About Decarbonization: Understanding the Canadian Context session, subject-matter experts Stephanie Poole and Marc Désaulniers answered many questions about decarbonization and the challenges teams are facing right now.
If you weren't able to attend this session, here is a Q&A highlight.
Watch the video or read the transcript below.
Marc: There are many business cases of ISO 50001 successes which always show energy reduction of the order of three to five per cent year-after-year, in the first few years at least. So after three years, you can expect a ten to fifteen percent reduction just as a result of implementing an energy management system in your industry. This is something that can be quite convincing because it's a pretty low investment. You don't invest big capital there. You need some new meters, maybe some collection of data that will enable you to see your KPIs and make graphs. But this is not big capital.
Then you implement the culture inside your company, which should be embraced first by the top management and then by all personnel. You get to a point where you constantly improve your performance, and it's a very financially attractive project once you do that.
That's how I would convince an industrial facility: by saying it's financially attractive, low-cost, and the return-on-investment.
Stephanie: I'm going to add to that. We're implementing ISO 50001 with a couple of clients right now. If you actually look at the ISO 50001 requirements, you don't need an EMIS (energy management information system); you don't need to pay for an expensive, complicated EMIS. All you need to do is monitor your energy use.
What we've found is that a lot of clients look at this and say, "I need a full EMIS, I need full sub-metering setups", which we are doing with some clients; it's part of their goals. But really, what ISO 50001 wants from you is that you look at the energy more than once every five years when you do a study. It puts in place some strategies and foundations to allow you to do that.
If you are trying to convince facilities:
We work with a lot of facility managers who say, "I manage 42 buildings. I don't have time for anything else. I'm running flat out with complaints and equipment failing. I don't have time to take on anything new". We have actually tried and failed with some of these clients because facilities are really busy. We thought, "We'll give them a new system. It will make their lives easier". What ends up happening is they respond, "I don't want a new system. I don't want to learn a new system. I don't want to use a new system," and then it falls flat.
What I would recommend before investing in a new fancy EMIS is a spreadsheet that you put your energy data in, and then you graph it to see "Wow, that was a big spike between this month and last month. I wonder what's going on". That's really a great place to start.
I think sometimes people assume they need a beautiful, fancy tool, and yes, EMSs are lovely, but if you're not going to use them for what they're worth, they have very high upfront costs of setup and very high ongoing maintenance contract costs. You can start with something super simple: get your energy use into a table.
The other thing I would say is convincing facilities to run new low-carbon systems, use the EMIS, look at the energy history, etc. is one of the biggest challenges we face too; getting facilities on board who have either been burned by sustainability projects in the past, because they made their lives more complicated, or they weren't engaged, or they created more comfort complaints.
The first thing you need to do is go and talk to facilities and understand what their constraints are and what their problems are. The goal of energy efficiency and this EMIS is actually to make their lives easier, but oftentimes that's not how it works. I work with a lot of facility managers who say, "Well, I don't like sustainability because they did all this stuff and then it caused a bunch of comfort complaints," or "They installed this new piece of equipment and I don't know how to run it, and I was never trained". They've had bad experiences. Engage with them and figure out the best thing you can do that isn't going to add to their load.
Moises: That's a really good point. From the exposure I've had with facility teams, most of the time they know what is causing an issue or they know what the low-hanging fruit are. Engaging them early just makes so much sense.
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