Need to Upgrade Your Energy Efficiency Without Overspending? Where in the Heck Do You Start?

Maybe you have multiple facilities to deal with, perhaps hundreds. You may also have limited capital to invest in upgrading your energy efficiency. That conundrum leaves a lot of facilities professionals stuck, not knowing how they should move ahead.

Where do I start?

That’s the number one question Energy Management Collaborative (EMC) hears from facility leaders. So, where do you invest capital to make upgrades? How many locations should you do at one time? How fast can you make the change? How can you ensure consistency across your locations?

The answer is to go step-by-step.

Step 1: The Priority is to Prioritize

A lot of companies perform energy upgrades site-by-site with no strategic prioritization. They choose technology before they know what site needs what. That can waste budget and valuable resources on low-impact sites that could have waited for an upgrade.

The first order of business is to figure out which of your locations has the greatest need for a lighting upgrade or new building controls based on the potential energy and utility savings. If you can see data for individual locations, this can be your first course of action.

Prioritization saved more than $1 Million for a big-box retailer. They were looking to reduce initial costs on their LED lighting project and EMC helped them prioritize a 50 site roll-out in their portfolio. That cut initial project costs by $126,000.

After an EMC prioritization based on available incentives (see below) for 50 additional sites, the next phase of the project reduced initial project costs by $1.3 million.

Now that you’ve prioritized, what do you do next?

Step 2: Your Facilities Need an Audit

What if you could easily sort through all of the possible energy efficiency combinations to help you discover hidden opportunities? Think of how much you could optimize your savings and how that would confirm your priorities. EMC offers a dedicated audit team that employs a proven process that delivers the accuracy you need to move forward with confidence.

Step 3: Move Forward With the Best Design for Your Facilities

What if you could easily choose the best options from all available energy efficiency products to find the best fit and optimal performance for your locations? EMC has an in-house design team that can leverage extensive product data to find exactly what you need.

Step 4: Make Sure You Take Advantage of Any Available Incentives

It’s possible for you to maximize utility savings potential for a lighting retrofit project. You just need to tap into a resource that can leverage relationships with utilities across the country. EMC can help you with that with the industry’s only in-house incentive analyst team.

Step 5: Staying Operational During Installation

How much disruption can your business handle and still do business? You’ll need to work with a resource that can work around your schedule and carefully coordinate materials delivery and installation schedules. We’ve done that thousands of times.

Step 6: Start on Time, Finish on Time. Or Even Faster

Proper installation requires a complete, clear scope of work and schedule, the guarantee of clean job sites, flexibility to meet dynamic site needs, and strong communication that leads to coordination to get the job done right. The faster and better the installation, the faster you accrue savings from decreased energy and maintenance expenses. EMCs system maximizes everything to your advantage.

Step 7: Make Sure Someone is Managing Your Warranties

Once the project is completed, you need to make certain that you have the right service plan that fits your locations’ unique, evolving needs to make sure you get the most efficiency and longest life for your lighting and energy infrastructure.

All you need now is someone to help you get started and get things done.

EMC offers customers a prioritization process along with an enhanced consultative approach that has been proven to drive bottom line value.

That process is called EnergyMAXX^® and it was designed to simplify the process of prioritizing energy efficient projects for customers with thousands of sites nationwide.

Our customers can choose their main project influencer—payback, lowest net cost, or Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)—and EMC will run scenarios based on technology options and utility program rebates and incentives.

At the end of your consultation, the prioritization tool will have evaluated a wide range of possible design options and the incentive potential for each, giving you the data to make the best choice for your business.

By generating and comparing various scenarios based on your priorities, EMC will provide you with personalized results that help you maximize the long-term value of your investments.

EMC has a long history of designing, installing and maintaining LED lighting, building management systems, HVAC and specialized energy projects nationwide. We've delivered thousands of lighting and energy upgrade projects, saving Fortune 500 clients more than 27 billion kWh of energy. 

Discover how EMC and EnergyMAXX^® create clarity, savings and efficiency. Connect with us below.