Any company with 250 employees or more, annual turnover exceeding £39.8 million or a balance sheet exceeding £34.2 million qualifies a company as 'large'. If this sounds like you, then you'll need to do three things to comply with the assessment.
The first phase is to measure total energy consumption across buildings, transport and industrial processes. Energy auditing activity – for example, the Carbon Trust Standard dating back to December 2011 – can be used to support compliance provided it meets the minimum requirements of ESOS.
Alternatively, if you have an ISO50001 energy management system covering your factory's energy usage, this is sufficient to constitute an ESOS assessment too. The deadline for the first phase is approaching fast – it must be completed by 5 December 2015 if your business is to be considered compliant.
The second phase involves conducting an energy audit to identify cost-effective energy efficiency plans that it can feasibly implement. The deadline for compliance of phrase two is 5 December 2019.
The third phase requires relevant companies to share a report of the previous step with the Environment Agency.
Using this self-diagnostic process, large companies can devise and implement energy efficiency strategies to reduce running costs and help contribute to lowering the UK's carbon footprint.
We have come across some shocking industry facts in regards to efficiency, or rather, inefficiency. For example, 65% of the UK's industrial energy consumption comes from electric motors alone. That's a massive 20% of the UK's total energy consumption.
Using a variable speed drive (VSD) on a motor can reduce energy consumption dramatically, in some cases by as much as 60%. It's therefore surprising that these humble devices are often neglected or even fitted improperly, rendering them useless.
Forgetting the financial costs of not implementing a VSD for a second, if just half of Britain's electric motors were reduced in speed by 10%, it would have the net effect of mitigating for the carbon emissions of 9.8 million executive saloon cars every year. That's quite an astounding decrease: mother earth certainly would be pleased with that.
So if you're a large manufacturer involved with ESOS, now is the ideal time to use ESOS to start implementing cost and energy efficiency tactics.
