Perspectives on Small Business Energy Efficiency today focuses on Knowledge.
Business energy efficiency programs are often described by the small and medium sized business owner and manager in passive terms such as lenient, compliant, or latent. While it is often assumed this lack of engagement is cost driven, we are finding now that it is actually knowledge or competency driven.
Most audits today continue to be engineering focused, foregoing behavioral aspects. This knowledge gap increases the cost hurdle, foregoing lower and no cost human behavioral modification and management at lower cost. The outcome is not surprising. A good continually improving business must contain both engineering and behavioral solutions based on proper EM&V (IPMVP, ISO 50001, etc.) to succeed.
Knowledge GAP
Commercial building and industrial Clients in general are often befuddled by the utility and engineers jargon. To be fair it is a complex process and can be dangerous. It has taken 100 years to get to where we are today with a safe and common system supply. However the user interface remains difficult.
Outside of the few facility and plant engineers the key importance of understanding these terms relative to business operations needs to be translated to the CFO and investable analyst community as well as making the common user interface significantly easier to negotiate. NEST is a perfect well known example.
NEST has almost singlehandedly taken obtuse concepts like “Demand Charge, Therm, and Load Factor” and idiot proofed the engagement process, marrying behavioral and engineering into one. Now what we need is to scale up this example and some have finally done this targeting enterprises to small businesses.
Knowledge Base Topics
| Example General Utility Terms from UEDA |
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| Electric Terms |
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| Gas Terms |
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Small Business Solutions
Small businesses can overcome these knowledge deficits by using easily understood, cloud based, and inexpensive performance improvement programs such as Veritatis’s – ENERIT Partner Program. this video highlights just some of the attributes and whats more is its independently managed and will also serve to check on the utility.
The Veritatis – ENERIT system is one of our scaled small and medium size business solution vendors focused on this space. We engage behavioral and engineering project performance management using minimal investment and easy to understand metrics for everyone, including CFO’s, accounting, and energy staff. Other tools available allow it to be scaled across the Enterprise.