Get Big Energy Management Ideas in Bite-Sized Chunks...
Receive a free series of educational emails delivered right to you.
If you spend more than about $1 million a year on energy, your potential savings are big enough to make this worth your time.
If you operate more than about 20 stores, your energy-management challenges are complex enough that you’ll welcome these ideas, specifically aimed at multisite retailers.
Facilities Blog Posts
Sustainability resource planning platform delivers a powerful set of process automation and operations management products for facilities & buildings, the assets located at those locations, and the people who manage and maintain them.
Agency Sustainability
Is Agency Sustainability a Realistic Objective?
Popular opinion may dictate that the federal government is not as inherently efficient as some of our top performing private and public corporations and this thought is likely to receive considerable airtime as the overall concept of federal agency sustainability comes into question.
Pres. Obama recently signed a new executive order stipulating that each agency pay considerable attention to its overall efficiency, reducing its reliance on traditional forms of energy and thereby cutting down on its carbon emissions significantly. This will undoubtedly place a great amount of pressure on each agency as the order strikes at the very heart of governmental efficiency.
Executive order 13514 may not have garnered a lot of publicity in the mainstream press, but we can be sure that department heads and chiefs are very focused on its contents. Agency sustainability is now no longer a thought, but must become a process and a reality for each agency to be able to arrive at a target percentage for greenhouse gas emission reductions over the next 10 years.
A previous executive order signed by Obama's predecessor only touched on the overall need for carbon emission reductions, but this order places it at the heart of the matter. An agency must look closely at its entire resource usage, including waste management and water usage and must make several declarations of intent to “green” federal facilities and buildings.
Agency Sustainability
While certain federal agencies are responsible for overseeing climate related issues and for enforcing any future legislation that might emerge from the halls of Congress, many other agencies are not used to talking about climate related issues on a regular basis and thus the concept of agency sustainability for them might be a very different proposition.
We are told that the government is the country's largest energy user and thus the largest producer of carbon emissions. This will take some unraveling as it will be necessary to analyze every single facet of the agency operations down to the very last and smallest asset.
Agency Sustainability
To enable an understanding of the very meaning of agency sustainability in the first place will require that each agency knows the size of its carbon footprint. This information is only sketchily available and will pose the first and maybe most significant challenge ahead. When each asset manager has arrived at a true assessment of his or her operations, this information may be correlated and a global picture of the agency position revealed.
It can be safely assumed that federal agencies are not in possession of the necessary specialist software and solutions to help them analyze and gather the information that they need. It is also true to say that if each agency conforms with the requirements of the order and follows through on its intent, that we will see a much more efficient federal government operation in due course.
About Verisae
Verisae helps measure, manage and reduce equipment and energy costs including the related business and environmental impacts of carbon emissions. The Sustainability Resource Planning (“SRP”) software platform improves operational efficiency, protects brand integrity and helps ensure regulatory compliance for distributed enterprises across many industries. Verisae delivers a broad range of sustainability solutions to dozens of clients globally with thousands of daily users including an extended network of third-party suppliers. Verisae’s integrated sustainability platform actively tracks millions of assets across thousands of sites worldwide.
RELATED PAGES
Read Recommendations from Sustainability Experts
How to Reduce Costs & Improve Efficiencies
Watch Our 3 Minute Sustainability Overview (video)
Follow the Conversation
© 2012 Verisae. All rights reserved.