An energy audit is a recognized method of reducing energy costs by identifying inefficiencies, lack of best practice and by optimizing tariff structures.  For the industrial, commercial and agricultural sectors, an energy audit will  find many opportunities to reduce energy costs, often at low or no cost.  For industrial users, an energy audit will find many energy savings in the areas of compressed air, steam, lighting, process heating and cooling, and drives.  For the commercial sector,  an energy audit will find many opportunities to reduce energy costs in the areas of lighting, heating, air conditioning and ventilation.  For the agricultural sector, energy savings can be found in lighting, heating and ventilation and waste water treatment.

For all sectors, staff training and management of energy can offer good energy cost savings.  Environmental Efficiency can provide staff awareness training and assist you in developing energy management procedures.

Environmental Efficiency has undertaken in excess of 500 energy audits in Ireland for large and small users.  In addition over 100 energy assessments have been undertaken by Environmental Efficiency under the SEAI Advice Mentoring and Assessment Scheme.

In order to determine the scope for increasing the efficiency of energy use, it is useful for an organisation to determine its Energy Performance Index (PEI), often also called the Specific Energy Consumption, and then compare it with benchmarks for the same business sector.   If there is little difference between your PEI and best practice for the sector, then any further improvement may incur high capital cost.  However, if there is a significant gap, this first shows that there is scope for improvement, and secondly that many improvements can be gained at low cost.  Typical EPIs are in terms of kWh/widget for manufacturing or kWh/m² for commercial sectors.  Environmental Efficiency can undertake this exercise and supply comparison data. 

If it is felt that there is scope for improvement, it is usual to engage consultants to undertake an energy audit.  This would review the current management of energy, how it is used, how energy use is controlled, where the losses are and the scope for renewable energy and waste heat recovery.  Environmental Efficiency has a great deal of experience with energy auditing for both large and small organizations.  Our average cost saving identified through energy audits is 23% within a 15 month financial payback.

Energy audits will typically identify between 15 and 20 energy saving opportunities that are considered practical.  These opportunities will be presented in the energy audit report with a ranking as to financial payback.  Once the energy audit report has been presented, Environmental Efficiency can then help firm up on details, perhaps by additional data logging and engineering calculations, a process sometimes referred to as a feasibility study.  Following this Environmental Efficiency can help with commissioning trials and staff training.