| In a nutshell, energy awareness is about understanding how much energy we use, and striving to reduce it. For an energy manager at a business, raising energy awareness is about educating staff to the energy consumption that their day-to-day work activities are responsible for, and encouraging them to reduce it.The benefits the come from raising energy awareness are plentiful: cost savings (particularly important as energy costs rise), carbon savings (important for reducing your company's carbon footprint and promoting its green image), and also your company's profitability will become less dependent on the whims of the energy-pricing market.Most importantly, raising energy awareness is about the simplest way to start saving energy without having to invest money into energy-saving equipment etc. Because raising energy awareness is purely a question of changing people's behaviour.But that's not to suggest that it's easy to raise energy awareness... In fact it can be quite a challenge. Most people are oblivious to the energy consumption that their actions are responsible for, and far too busy with their actual work to give their energy consumption a moments thought...Or at least those are attitudes that you will come across frequently at any rate!So how do you tackle these obstacles, and turn your staff into energy-aware people (that hopefully use a lot less energy than they do at the moment)?Here are some ideas:- Strategically placed posters can help to put energy consumption on people's radars.- You could arrange for regular meetings (e.g. monthly) to highlight the energy wastage that was responsible last month, and to draw attention to progress that has been made since the month before.- Email campaigns are an easy way to raise the energy awareness of your staff - simply send the occasional email out to alert staff to a specific feature.Whatever approach you take, you'll find it a lot more effective if you can personalize it for your building. I wrote more about this in an article on energy awareness at http://www.energylens.com/articles/energy-awarenessThe essential idea is that people are far more likely to respond to your campaign if it appears that your campaign is about them, and the energy that they use. Generic save-the-world and switch-the-lights-off posters have become so common, people barely notice them any more. However, it's pretty much certain that they won't be aware of how much energy your building uses, particularly if you can break it down into specific times (e.g. overnight, weekends, lunch hours), and specific departments or floors. |
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