Last month, we covered how today’s refrigeration and industrial energy needs are different from those of the past.
If you’ve set up processes to better track and assess your facility’s energy use, and have taken the time to assess trends and areas of high demand, it may be time to consider making energy-efficient upgrades–upgrades that often need high-level or executive approval in any organization.
But how do you “translate” energy efficiency into business strategy?
What does your leadership team value?
For those of us focused on efficiency, it can be frustrating to need to explain (what we feel) is obvious: energy savings = cost savings!
But upfront project costs and unplanned expenses, such as lost working days or lost product, can give any leadership team pause. It’s important to communicate that improvements to key facility functions–such as refrigeration–aren’t just about energy efficiency or even cost. They’re risk and margin protection strategies.
In the case of refrigeration, having optimized systems also reduces risk around the integrity of your product. Why roll the dice when it comes to product quality or production continuity?
Being able to position energy efficiency not just as an optimized process, but also as a risk mitigation asset, helps communicate its value beyond dollars and cents.
The case for every team member:
Still, each member of your executive or leadership team will view these upgrades with their own strategic lens (as they should!). Here, we break down the business case for each team member when it comes to implementing energy-efficient upgrades:
- Chief Financial Officer
Communicating ROI is key. In the case of the Chief Financial Officer, this can look like calculating payback on energy-efficient measures, researching available rebates or incentives, providing figures on avoided peak costs, and adjusting your company’s ROI to reflect lower risk when it comes to facility operations.
- Chief Operating Officer
Your Chief Operating Officer will be interested in any potential disruptions to everyday operations. Energy efficiency upgrades can improve operational performance by affecting things such as uptime, product quality, capacity of your machinery, and overall resilience of your facility.
- Engineering Lead
Measure, measure, measure! Provide data and figures that support how these proposed changes would increase system stability, improve maintainability, and provide a safe operating envelope.
- Sustainability Lead
The tie-in here is almost automatic: by implementing energy-efficient upgrades at your facility, you’ll be reducing emissions and energy needed to run business operations, as well as supporting a more resilient local grid for your community.
Ultimately, an energy-efficient or energy optimized system increases strategic flexibility, operational assurance, and margin protection. In every case, it’s important to run the cost-benefit analysis for your particular facility–as well as implement a practical action plan for getting started.
