5 Reasons to use data to improve sustainability

Leverage data to gain valuable insights into the inner workings of your business to make data-driven decisions – become more efficient, profitable and sustainable.

1) Reduce greenhouse gases improve sustainability. Boards and the directors of those boards are coming under increasing pressure to clearly demonstrate their businesses plans towards a zero carbon future. High quality utility data and data analytics speed up your ability to create and publish reports, target carbon certifications and achieve compliance with legislation such as the Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Act 2019 or industry standards such as ISO 14064:2018, ISO 50001 and others.

2) Energy efficiency is the easiest and cheapest way for most businesses to deal with rising energy costs and reduce their emissions. An organisation can expect to reduce their utility usage by 15% if they spend 2.5% on energy management and a further 2.5% on implementation. According to the Energy and Efficiency Conservation Authority (EECA).

3) Manage what you can measure – implementing a comprehensive utility Monitoring and Targeting (M&T) programme will have a range of benefits including;

• Improve Visibility – a majority of businesses we work with don’t have the tools to quickly or  easily identify where or when utilities are being. This lack of visibility invariably means business find it difficult to manage their utility usage and spend. M&T provides this visibility.
• Insights – if you then mix this data set with weather/ hours of operation/production/ other key business metrics  – utility wastage, operational inefficiencies and productivity improvements are quickly revealed.
• Take action – M&T systems provide you the confidence to further invest in efficiency initiatives as you have the means to track and report on the business performance of those decisions and hold suppliers to account.
• Improve forecasting – with the right data sets and knowing your key production metrics you will be able to accurately model utility use, cost and emissions profiles.
• Optimise utility tariffs – M&T systems provide the fine detail of when you use utilities allowing you to optimise usage patterns within tariff parameters, again reducing cost.

4) Unexpected Benefits – Utility data analysis can highlight unusual patterns, like a machine drawing more energy than usual. This enables early identification of mechanical issues, greatly reducing production stoppages and waste, saving you time and money. Smarter preventative maintenance ensures better control of your servicing requirements, relieving you from generic maintenance schedules and reducing downtime.

5) Your competitors are already investing in data analytics. ESP have deployed more than 700 systems across New Zealand, saving our clients an average of 16% utility usage, and leading to a combined utiltiy saving of over $43 million dollars, reduced energy use by 293 GWh, and avoided GHG emissions of 54 million kgCO2-e.