MONITORING AND TARGETING

The purpose of monitoring and targeting (M&T) is to relate your energy consumption data to the weather, production figures or other measures in such a way that you get a better understanding of how energy is being used. In particular, it will identify whether there are signs of avoidable waste or other opportunities to reduce consumption.

Data collection may be manual, automated, or a mixture of the two. Once an M&T scheme has been set up, its routine operation should be neither time consuming nor complex. An M&T scheme will provide essential underpinning for your energy management activities, allowing you to:

• Detect avoidable energy waste that might otherwise remain hidden. This is waste that occurs at random because of poor control, unexpected equipment faults or human error, and which can usually be put right quickly and cheaply (or, indeed, at no cost). Intercepting and rectifying such problems should more than cover the cost of operating the M&T scheme
• Quantify the savings achieved by any and all of your energy projects and campaigns in a manner that accounts fully for variations in weather, levels of production activity and other external factors. Many users cite this as the most valuable result of M&T
• Identify fruitful lines of investigation for energy surveys. Rather than starting a survey with no clear agenda, you can go prepared with specific questions to ask, prompted by observed erratic or unexpected patterns of consumption
• Provide feedback for staff awareness, improve budget setting and undertake benchmarking

M&T can generally be approached in two perspectives. One is the routine use (on a weekly cycle, for example). Routine M&T is quick and simple and requires no particular expertise on the part of the user. This type of data capture is often employed within an organisation where retrospective review is often some time after the data is captured e.g. at quarter or year end to determine performance over the period.

The other perspective is target-setting and diagnosis, an aspect that will appeal to those who wish to analyse data in more depth and identify potential for waste avoidance at the earliest opportunity. This aspect needs to be addressed when first setting up an M&T scheme.

M&T is an extensive topic and includes many different techniques to determine specific outputs. PROjEN can assist your organisation in preparing, establishing and implementing a suitable M&T system to assist in identifying potential energy and carbon reduction benefits.

For more infromation about Monitoring and Targeting visit www.monitoringandtargeting.co.uk