Energy efficiency is increasingly becoming a lever for profitability and growth in today’s carbon-conscious world – and more companies than ever are taking notice.
According to a blog on Schneider Electric’s website, 96 percent of companies now employ energy-efficient technology, while the pace of adoption in renewables and energy storage is also accelerating at 11 percent from the previous year.
Enabling Long-Term Growth
Despite increasing uptake, many companies struggle to translate their investments in energy efficient technologies and systems into sustainable, long-term growth. The reason is simple: despite heavy investments into energy efficiency projects with strong independence and ownership of budgets, these implementations are typically deployed as standalone projects. Unsurprisingly, a siloed approach is inherently difficult to scale and makes it difficult to gain buy-in from multiple stakeholders to achieve greater economies of scale.
A global pharmaceutical manufacturer quickly realised this, which led to the implementation of an enterprise change management program to bring top-level decision-makers together. Best practices were quickly standardised and adopted across the organisation. Within three years, this translated to US$7 million in annual energy savings, and culminated in a reduction of 4,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions.
Cognizant of this, many forward-thinking businesses are now shelving independently managed sustainability initiatives in favour of a more centralised approach to tackle more projects and generate more energy savings than before. Importantly, by engaging all stakeholders as part of a holistic strategy, they can tap into brand new portfolio-wide opportunities to achieve the organisation’s long-term sustainability goals much quicker.
Encouraging Sustainability
Below are three core considerations for organisations to unlock the speed and scale of their sustainability programs for greater energy efficiency.
- Accelerate decision-making – It is vital to establish a centralised governance and sustainability strategy to ensure buy-in at the highest level and to keep sustainability goals aligned with core business decisions. By making energy and carbon part of the investment decision-making process and CAPEX planning discussions, sustainability moves from an afterthought shoehorned in after the fact to being made into an inextricable part of the business itself.
- Localise implementation – It is all good and well to have a cohesive enterprise-wide strategy. One size does not fit all though, and it is important to ensure that implementation plans are localised or designed with adequate leeway for local teams to access the requisite financing and engineering support to move them forward. And for extraordinarily complex projects, sustainability experts from organisations such as Schneider Electric can always available to help.
- Facilitate change management – As with other enterprise projects, success stories must be captured and shared. More than logical arguments, successful implementations play a crucial role to change the minds of even the staunchest naysayers.
Genuine change starts from the top, so don’t neglect to keep building in-house expertise. Finally, it is imperative that executives understand why specific actions are taken, and that ROIs are duly documented and shared as evidence of the impact.
Another façade of sustainability is none other than renewable energy, which do not run out and are ideal replacements for fossil fuels. Read more here.
