From Guest Blogger Julie Palmer: EU Looking to Get Tough on Companies Over Energy Audits
It is no secret that companies contribute on a massive scale to overall carbon emissions through their operations whether local, national or global. But the question for a long time has been what to do about it and how to encourage enterprises towards practices that help reduce the scale of their carbon footprints.
Well, within the European Union (EU) at least, one important policy in this context relates to energy audits, through which companies can gain a better and more accurate sense of how they use or misuse non-renewable energy resources. The hope and expectation is that by investing in these so-called ‘green’ audits, businesses will become more willing and able to reduce their energy use and save money in the long term.
Naming and shaming
Across the EU, green audits are being taken increasingly seriously as a means of helping to reduce non-renewable energy use, with individual countries taking up the challenge of improving practices within their own borders. In fact, recent EU energy directives now insist that companies that operate on a large scale must assess and report on their energy use on an annual basis.
The latest directives are designed to force the worst offenders as far as energy use is concerned to make changes and cut the scale of carbon emissions they’re responsible for. In the UK and elsewhere, thousands of businesses are falling into line and appointing assessors to scrutinise their energy use and carbon outputs. But there are many companies that are yet to take action on the issue despite sizable fines set to be issued routinely to those that fail to comply before end of 2015.
As an added incentive to get these policies right, enterprises are also set to be named and shamed as having failed to comply with the latest laws on green audits and on energy use management at an enterprise level.
Potential savings
For companies concerned by the prospect of being forced by financial sanctions to take action and start looking more closely at their energy use, the good news is that there is plenty of money to be saved along the way.
The EU’s laws on energy audits are designed to affect the behaviour of big companies first with those that turnover more than €50 million annually being obliged to appoint assessors as a matter of urgency ahead of a deadline for compliance on December 5th 2015.
But those large companies are precisely those who should stand to benefit the most because big businesses tend to find the greatest potential savings as a result of green audits.
The hope for the EU, the UK and the rest of the world is that large enterprises start to realise sooner rather than later just how much money they might actually stand to save by implementing even the simplest of energy efficiency strategies. Hopefully they might also start to see more clearly that the use of renewable energy sources is a more viable long-term operational strategy.
Julie Palmer is a Regional Managing Partner at BTG Green; a UK subsidiary of Begbies Traynor Group who help thousands of companies and organisations every year with matters relating to finance, insolvency and compliance.
