Why Monitor & Target?

Most organisations find out how much energy they used when the bill arrives, weeks after the money was spent. By then, whatever went wrong has been running for a month or more, and nobody can say what "should" have been used anyway. Monitoring and targeting (M&T) fixes both problems. It is the discipline of measuring consumption frequently, comparing it against what the conditions say it should have been, and investigating the gap. It needs no capital equipment to start, and it is consistently one of the highest-return activities in energy management.

The cost of finding out late

Consider a site using 500,000 kWh of gas a year. In November, a heating valve sticks partially open, so the boilers run harder than the building needs. Nothing fails outright, nothing alarms, and the building feels normal. The fault quietly wastes 15% of the winter quarter's gas.

Without M&T, the first hint is the quarterly bill, and even then it is ambiguous: was the quarter cold, or is something wrong? On a winter quarter of 200,000 kWh, the waste is 30,000 kWh, which at £0.06/kWh costs £1,800. In practice, faults like this often survive several bill cycles, because each bill looks only slightly high and there is nothing to compare it against.

With weekly M&T, the fault appears as an exception in the first report after it develops. Caught in week one, the same fault costs roughly 2,300 kWh, about £138. The difference between £1,800 and £138 did not come from a boiler upgrade or an insulation project. It came from a spreadsheet and the habit of looking at it.

Why "targeting" matters as much as "monitoring"

Monitoring alone tells you what happened. Targeting adds two things. The first is a baseline model of what consumption should have been given the conditions: the weather, the production volume, the occupancy. The second is a target that improves on the baseline, so the programme drives reduction rather than documenting the status quo. A site that monitors without targeting produces graphs nobody acts on. A site that targets without a credible baseline sets numbers nobody believes. You need both, and this course covers both.

What a working programme looks like

In steady state the routine is modest. Consumption data arrives automatically, weekly or better. A simple model predicts what each meter should have recorded. A short exception report lists the meters that deviated beyond an agreed threshold, and someone with the authority to investigate does so. Findings feed back into the model, targets tighten as improvements land, and results are reported in the language the audience cares about. For the finance director, that means pounds, not kilowatt hours.

Sector experience, including the Carbon Trust's published guidance, consistently puts the savings from a well-run M&T programme at around 5% of annual energy spend, with more available on sites that have never had one. The savings come from faults detected early, from waste that had become routine, and from the simple fact that consumption which is watched behaves differently from consumption which is not.

The rest of this course builds the toolkit in order: collecting the data, correcting it for weather and activity, establishing a baseline, reading energy signatures, decomposing changes, setting targets, and reporting exceptions so they get acted on.

Sources and further reading

• Carbon Trust guides and tools, including its monitoring and targeting guidance on programme design and typical savings.
• ISO 50001 energy management, which embeds M&T as the measurement core of an energy management system.
• CIBSE knowledge portal for TM39, the standard reference on building energy metering.