Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme's impact on UK industry discussed

However, whilst in the home it's relatively easy to ensure lights are not left on unnecessarily and electrical devices don’t spend endless hours on standby, for large businesses it's considerably more difficult. That's why the UK government has launched the Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme (ESOS).

Established by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), ESOS is a response to the requirement for all member states of the European Union to implement article eight of the Energy Efficiency Directive. The scheme is estimated to lead to £1.6Bn net benefits to the UK - that's the cost of running just over 1.2m standard light bulbs for a year.

ESOS is a mandatory energy assessment and energy saving identification scheme for large companies in the UK. To clarify this further, 250 employees or more, annual turnover exceeding £39.8m or a balance sheet exceeding £34.2m qualifies a company as large. If this sounds like your company, you need to do three things to comply with the assessment. These three phases have a completion time of four years each.

The first phase is to measure total energy consumption across buildings, transport and industrial processes. Energy auditing activity - for example the Carbon Trust Standard dating back to December 2011 - can be used to support compliance, provided it meets the minimum requirements of ESOS. Alternatively, if you have an ISO50001 energy management system covering your energy usage, this is sufficient to constitute an ESOS assessment too. This first phase must be completed by December 5, 2015 for your business to be considered compliant.

The second phase of the assessment involves a company conducting an energy audit to identify cost-effective energy efficiency plans that it can feasibly implement. The deadline for compliance of phrase two is December 5, 2019.

Finally, the third phase requires relevant companies to share a report of the previous step with the Environment Agency. Using this self diagnostic process, large companies can devise and implement energy efficiency strategies to reduce running costs and help contribute to lowering the UK's carbon footprint. 

Here at European Automation we know some shocking industry facts in regards to efficiency, or rather, inefficiency.

65% of the UK's industrial energy consumption comes from electric motors alone. That's a massive 20% of the UK's total energy consumption.

Using a Variable Speed Drive (VSD) on a motor can severely reduce energy consumption, in some cases by as much as 60%. It's therefore surprising that these humble devices are often neglected or even fitted improperly, rendering them useless.

Forgetting the financial costs of not implementing a VSD for a second, if just half of Britain’s electric motors were reduced in speed by 10%, it would have the net effect of mitigating for the carbon emissions of 9.8m executive saloon cars every year. That's quite an astounding decrease: mother earth certainly would be pleased with that.

So if you're a large company involved with ESOS, you might want to think about some cost and energy-efficient tactics - maybe give us a call, we'd love to help. It could benefit billions of people in the long run.