The Energy Manager as an active link in the business: where the money really hides

One number that blinds the organisation

In our practice we regularly see the Energy Manager viewed by colleagues from other functions through the lens of a single number: how many MWh were cut against the previous year. It looks like a fair, hard KPI. In practice it can be unfair to the person in the role and, above all, it blinds the organisation to new, real sources of value and marginalises the function. The Energy Manager ought to be an active link in the business.

Cutting consumption is only one of several dimensions. In facilities with strong tariff volatility — and there are more of them every year as dynamic markets reach further into B2B segments — a bigger business effect comes from lowering peak demand, reshaping the consumption profile towards cheaper hours, or reducing exposure to the market price in expensive hours. Two sites with identical monthly consumption can generate bills differing by tens of percent if their consumption profiles and contract structures differ.

Sometimes it is worth consuming more

The hardest moment to accept, in many organisations, is the one where we show that sometimes it is worth consuming more. It sounds counter-intuitive and requires a separate conversation with the controlling function.

Under conditions of renewables oversupply, which European markets now see several times a month, short-term prices fall to token levels and, in individual hours, to negative ones. Shifting part of consumption into those hours — while keeping the total unchanged — lowers the bill regardless of whether the site consumed 100 or 105 MWh over the month. A "total MWh down" KPI not only fails to support that decision; it can rule it out of the set of options altogether.

So where exactly does the money hide that the classic KPI cannot see? Here are five areas from our deployment projects.

1. Silent control anomalies

At one of the sites we serve, an audit of this category — equipment running at night that should have been off, a conflict between the heating and cooling systems, manual setpoints from the time of a momentary problem that nobody reverted, schedules set "temporarily" a year ago — revealed a reserve of around 9% of annual consumption, all of it recoverable with no capital expenditure. The payback on that kind of work is counted in weeks, not years.

2. A consumption profile mismatched to the contract

In sites with a stable profile, a fixed price per MWh is a rational contract. But in sites whose profile diverges from the profile of a standard purchase, that same contract generates a hidden mismatch cost of the order of several euros per MWh — spread across monthly settlements and nowhere visible directly. An Energy Manager who cannot calculate this does not, in fact, know what energy really costs at their site.

3. Thermal inertia as free storage

A site's thermal inertia is a natural, free energy store. In office buildings and warehouses, but also in cold stores, we use it to shift consumption. Cooling slightly during cheap hours makes it possible to switch off or substantially cut cooling in hours when prices are several times higher. With no investment in batteries — purely through deliberate control.

4. The cycle cost of battery storage

And what about physical storage? Controlled by the simple rule of "charge cheap, discharge expensive", it can earn from the price spread while losing more to accelerated cell degradation. In the installations we analyse with customers, sensible control requires a model in which at least four variables — price, forecast, state of charge and cycle cost — enter the same decision algorithm.

5. Benchmarking within the group

In networks of many sites, the greatest potential hides not in the sites with the highest nominal consumption but in those that deviate most from their own comparison group. A warehouse consuming 30% more energy per square metre than ten similar ones in the same portfolio is a "thief" that only becomes visible against the group — not against the company average.

Not how much, but how

These five areas share one common denominator: what matters is not the amount of energy consumed, but the way in which we consume it.

As long as the Energy Manager is judged solely through the lens of total kWh, most of these sources of value remain outside their mandate — and the organisation pays for it without even knowing. Resetting the definition of the KPI is not cosmetic. It is the condition for this role to earn its keep, for itself and for the company.