Power: energy management

Utility benchmarking

Roger Hawes, operations director - energy management, is experienced in the application of benchmarking techniques.

Benchmarking is not just about passively comparing your performance against national yardsticks. It is a far more positive activity, providing participants with an opportunity to share their experience and pool ideas in active pursuit of best conceivable practice.


Often this results in conclusions which you will never find published anywhere.

Energy benchmarking groups can be set up:

	as an in-house activity for multi-site companies
	with other companies in the same industry
	on a cross-sector basis

The process, which typically takes six months from beginning to end, comprises:

	initial group consultation to determine what members want to achieve, and what information they will need to collect
	data gathering by group members
	expert analysis of data
	presentation and discussion of preliminary findings Site visits
	further analysis and development of conclusions
	a meeting to review the main findings
	final report

For the process to work effectively, we ask members to participate in a non-competitive, open-minded and open-handed spirit, and we promise complete confidentiality. As much is learned from members' mistakes as from successes, and on many occasions the accepted wisdom of (for example) standard government advice and published yardsticks have been shown to be wrong for some, if not all, energy users.