UK businesses ‘concerned’ over escalating energy costs

Newcastle, 22 May 2012: Getting the best deal for domestic energy customers has become headline news in the wake of unwelcome hikes in energy prices. Yet according to new research commissioned by the energy monitoring technology specialist, Zeco Energy Ltd, many businesses and professionals are also worried about the impact of the mounting cost of their organisation’s energy bills.

The OnePoll survey, which questioned 500 financial decision-makers from across the UK, revealed that just 19 per cent of finance teams had responsibility for tracking and managing energy, despite the fact that energy is typically one of the highest expenses for business and a major source of avoidable waste and potential cost savings.

Elsewhere, responsibility fell to non-financial workers including office managers, facilities managers, energy managers and reception or security staff. 14 per cent of firms assigned no accountability for tracking and monitoring energy in their organisations.

“This research underlines the fact that finance teams need to do more to tackle avoidable waste and reduce the burden of what is often a major operational expenditure for the business,” says Jon Kent, founder and managing director of Zeco Energy Ltd. “Successfully achieving this will require a much higher degree of visibility, accountability and change. For this reason, it must become a priority for the finance teams and board members of any organisation.

The research has been commissioned to support the launch of Zeco Energy Manager, innovative energy management software which provides a simple and easy to use energy management solution for any business. Using wireless sensors, the new scalable, cloud-based solution empowers organisations to easily identify and stop energy waste before it occurs, generating substantial cost savings – an average of 15% – and delivering a fast return on investment in a matter of months.

“The data produced from bill validation, tariff analysis and building management systems is complex and difficult for most people to understand,” says Kent. “For this reason, Zeco Energy Manager has been specifically designed to give financial stakeholders an easy way to access and understand the information they need to effectively reduce energy waste and realise much-needed cost savings across their business.

“Zeco Energy Manager turns real-time energy consumption data into actionable information that can be easily used and understood by anyone. Making sure that energy consumers in the business have ownership, responsibility and accountability for what they use is critical to the behavioural change needed to keep energy efficiency high on the priority list for everyone. This is the real key to unlocking long-term energy cost savings for any business.”

Unlike many existing energy monitors or building management systems, the solution breaks down energy use beyond the incoming main meter, highlighting where, when and how much energy is being consumed in specific areas of the organisation. The easy-to-read dashboard presents information in a meaningful way that can readily be acted upon to prevent energy waste from occurring.

By using wireless sensors and other easy-to-fit energy management hardware, Zeco Energy Manager gives users the power to switch off areas of the business that are using energy such as lights and other equipment automatically outside of normal business hours and can also be operated remotely using the mobile application for the iphone.