During a recent meeting with prospect’s CFO this exact question has come up: How much energy will energy audit save our bakery?

A fair question coming from CFO: his job is to ensure that all investments generate value for the company. A direct question deserves a direct answer:

Energy Audit will save you nothing. Zero. Nada.
… Unless you act on its findings.

The whole purpose of energy audit is to find what can company gain through managing its energy procurement and use. Direct energy cost savings are routinely just a portion of business value a company gains.

Conversation with this particular prospect has uncovered that they have not chosen to use an interval based electricity tariffs because it required installation of an interval meter, which “was expensive.” In absence of interval meter they were charged based on an average load profile for the this area. This bakery operates 3 shifts with mostly office area, which means that night consumption was charged at roughly day rates. Very roughly, switch to interval-based tariff would reduce their monthly hydro bill by 7%, while audit fee was about 2% and cost of meter is negligible at all. A good audit would have uncovered this opportunity at once.

When prospect states that “audit is too expensive” or “metering is too expensive”, I am always curious: “Expensive compared to what?”