Measure, track, and benchmark
Successful energy management reduces your company’s energy requirements, saves money, and minimizes energy-related impacts on the business. Measuring, tracking and benchmarking of energy across all operations are your most powerful energy waste reduction tools.
Reducing energy waste requires that all forms of energy be regularly measured and tracked. Measuring and tracking help you set a starting point -- a baseline of energy performance -- from which to calculate improvements in your company’s operations.
From that baseline, you are then able to set improvement goals, judge changes in energy use, and determine when to take corrective action. As you can see, without good energy data, it is impossible to tell if you are really improving or not!
While measuring and tracking are great, benchmarking is the final step that gets you to the information you need to improve. Benchmarking is the comparison of a site’s or process’ energy performance over a specified period of time to another site or similar process. Benchmarking helps you answer the questions, “how are we doing?” and “how do we know?”
ENERGY STAR has a variety of benchmarking and tracking tools that are available to you through this website.