Businesses and central government organisations are to come under increasing pressure to understand their energy consumption and improve it, following the EU’s approval of a new Energy Efficiency Directive (ratified on 11th September 2012).
As part of a raft of measures designed to improve energy efficiency, the Directive will require all businesses except SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises) to carry out energy audits every four years. They will then be expected to take action to improve their energy performance based on the opportunities identified by the audit.
In parallel, ‘buildings owned and occupied by central government’ with a total useful floor area of more than 500m2 will be required to renovate 3% of their total floor area – or use alternative means to achieve equivalent energy savings.
A major challenge facing the majority of these organisations is accessing and analysing energy information across their estates. Typically this information will be housed in a range of locations managed by themselves and their suppliers. Often, it will also be in stored in different formats, so that consolidating and reporting on the data becomes a major, resource-intensive task.
Causeway Sustainability iQ is designed to significantly reduce the time required to collate such data and offers a typical return on investment of just a few months. It is available as remote-hosted ‘cloud’ Software as a Service to minimise local hardware requirements and IT support – and is procured through a competitive monthly fee that can be met from revenue budgets, so there is no capital outlay.
The new EU Energy Efficiency Directive will replace the Energy Savings Directive and the Cogeneration Directive. It will come into force 20 days from its publication in the EU’s Official Journal and member states will have 18 months to transpose it into their national laws.
Discover more about Causeway Sustainability iQ.
