What is the Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme (ESOS)?
The energy savings opportunities scheme (ESOS) is a mandatory energy assessment scheme for UK enterprises. The scheme seeks to measure a businesses total energy consumption and carries out energy efficiency audits in order to identify cost-effective energy-saving opportunities. By focusing on saving energy and implementing sustainable and renewable energy solutions, businesses can become more eco-friendly, saving them a significant amount of money, while being compliant with this EU directive..
What are the benefits of the ESOS?
ESOS energy audits have the potential to increase business profitability and competitiveness and help to identify energy efficiency measures. Estimated to lead to 1.6 billion net benefits to the UK, with the majority of these savings felt directly by businesses as a result of energy savings.
Key benefits of ESOS:
- Review your current processes and energy usage and collect key data for your business on how to become more eco-friendly.
- You can carry out internal energy usage and efficiency checks
- Identify energy saving opportunities based on the energy consumption profile and include life cycle costs assessments for identified energy-saving measures.
- You can utilize previous energy efficiency reports to support your compliance documentation.
Who qualifies for the ESOS scheme?
ESOS is applicable to large enterprises in the UK, which are defined as:
- Your business employs more than 250 employees
- You have an annual turnover of more than £44.1 million
- You have an annual balance sheet of over £37.9 million
- You are an overseas organisation with more than 250 employees in the UK
- Your company is part of a larger firm who falls into any of the above categories
It’s important to note that the public sector is not required to participate in the ESOS scheme.
ESOS compliance phases
It takes a four year period to become ESOS compliant as a business in the UK, and it is your responsibility as a business to assess your company and decide whether you will be required to participate in the ESOS scheme. You must do this according to the following phase and date deadlines.
Phase 2 Deadline: 5 December 2019
Phase 3 Deadline: 5 December 2023
Phase 4 Deadline: 5 December 2027
There are financial penalties for any organisation or business in the UK, that has not submitted their evidence pack to the environment agency by the above deadlines.
How to comply with the ESOS?
An ESOS Assessment requires you to action the following:
- Measure your total energy consumption as a business
- Conduct in-depth energy audits to identify cost-effective energy efficiency recommendations
- Report compliance to the Environment Agency which is the scheme administrator in the UK
If an organisation qualifies for the ESOS, it needs to undertake an assessment, which will help work out what it needs to do to comply.
- To carry out an ESOS energy audit as a business, you must use a minimum of 12 months energy consumption data in order to generate an accurate report and energy analysis.
- You must provide cost-effective recommendations for the area of your business that is being audited, or confirm that there is no scope for energy-efficient improvements.
- Recommendations must take into account costs to implement the change and energy efficiency benefits in detail.
- These audits must be done using energy consumption profiling.
- The energy audit must be overseen, conducted or reviews by an ESOS lead assessor as well as one or two board-level directors.
Finally, the company must inform the Environment Agency that compliance has been achieved.
Example energy savings methods to implement
Here are a few examples of how you can become more energy efficient as a business and comply with the ESOS scheme, in relation to your business premises.
- Turn down the heating
- Replace and update inefficient boilers in your business
- Install destratification fans
- Reduce hours of operation to minimise energy usage
- Specify efficiency motors of ventilation units, consider variable speed fans, review time settings and turn off when not in use
- Review air conditioning temperature controls, consider variable speed drivers, free cooling coils (using external air as a source of cooling instead)
- Install occupancy light sensors, install daylights sensors, review and improve the maintenance plan (more regular maintenance), replace inefficient incandescent bulbs with high effective LED Lightning or energy-saving fluorescent lighting.
ESOS guidance with Powerful Allies
Need text here for how Powerful Allies can help with ESOS. I would like to keep the word ‘guidance’ in the heading as ESOS guidance is searched for a lot. I would also like a heading/section about ‘ESOS Phase 2 guidance’ as this is searched for.
Powerful Allies can provide a full ESOS reporting service including:
- need bullet points here similar to the SECR ones you provided