Benchmarking Energy Use for Savings

The United States Environmental Protection Agency is responsible for ensuring energy efficiency and cost savings in homes and businesses across the country. Energy Star is one such program that was promoted by the United States Environmental Protection Agency in an attempt to help consumers evaluate and realize the efficiency of the appliances that they bring into their home. By using Energy Start appliances, it is possible to save a significant amount of money on monthly energy bills. In turn, makers and manufacturers of appliances want to be sure that their products can safely and proudly display the Energy Star logo in order to help promote sales. There are a number of benchmark programs that evaluate appliances for their energy use and efficiency and help companies promote themselves as being environmentally friendly and green.

Benchmarking is an important and highly regulated industry in which energy and water consumption are evaluated based on information provided through data collection and portfolio tracking by companies. Custom reporting options are often available depending on what resource the benchmarking company wants to track and what sort of reports they are looking to generate.

Some of the functions that a benchmarking company can perform include tracking multiple energy and water facilities at multiple locations for a particular company. They can also customize the names of meters and note which key information is coming from which site. Benchmarking is also available to track changes in your facility based on old records and performance numbers from the past. In this way, company's can view improvement based on percentages after normalizing for variables such as weather. The most important thing companies like this tracking tool for is to monitor how much they are spending on energy and water. Some companies also share this information with individuals and groups inside and outside of the corporation.

In the end, benchmarking is a way for large and small companies to track their energy use and expenditure while making changes that can help them save money in the long run. By tracking which facilities are using how much energy, certain modifications can be made to save the entire company money overall. If you are unsure about how to perform this sort of tracking and monitoring in your own company, it may be in your best interest to contact a professional organization near you that has experience and expertise in energy consumption monitoring. The investment you make up front will be worth the long term energy savings.