ISO 50001: Utility Significance

The release of ISO 50001, the first ISO standard for managing energy use, provides opportunities for engagement in energy management for a wide variety of stakeholders including end users, electric and gas utilities, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) of energy-using equipment, and suppliers. This article is the first in a three-part series examining the significance of ISO 50001 for utilities, OEMs and supply chains. 

ISO 50001 provides a standard methodology for a wide range of utility customers—industrial, commercial and institutional—to establish policies and procedures to manage energy and improve energy intensity transparently. Utilities can leverage ISO 50001 to upgrade their demand side management (DSM) programs to include energy management practices in addition to incentivizing discrete technologies. Helping their customers implement ISO 50001 can add value to utilities’ relationships with their customers.

Opportunities for Customer Engagement

Utilities can use ISO 50001 in their DSM programs to achieve broader participation by helping their customers implement ISO 50001. Encouraging their customers this way offers utilities the flexibility to address energy management, which can yield significant energy-efficiency gains.  Instead of focusing on specific systems or enhancements tied to an incentive, implementing energy management with assistance from or incentivized by a utility, may allow for more comprehensive energy efficiency implementation as firms look to improve their competitiveness.

Further, utility engagement can also help build a more robust energy efficiency human infrastructure. By co-sponsoring,  training on ISO 50001 utilities can engage industrial customers and contribute to the pool of Certified Practitioners in energy management systems and in specific industrial systems—such as steam, compressed air, process heating, and pumping systems. A greater number of Certified Practitioners can then be available throughout a utility’s service territory to support other firms seeking to use ISO 50001 or certify under Superior Energy Performance. In addition, the Electric Power Research Institute is developing a guidebook for electric utilities to help their members’ representatives understand the standard and how it is relevant for those members’ industrial customers.   

Utilities Exploring Integration

Some utilities are finding that their current DSM programs already are well aligned with ISO 50001. In BC Hydro’s analysis of ISO 50001 against their Power Smart Industrial Sustainable Energy Management Program, they found that the program met or partially met at least 60% of the requirements of ISO 50001. According to Kevin Wallace, Power Smart’s Industrial Business Strategy Manager, “We already had an existing program that was taking customers down the path but we didn’t know how far.  We stepped back and looked at what the standard entails vs. what we do and found that if a customer was to fully implement our program, it gets them 60% of the way there.”  In addition, their customer survey found wide interest in the standard, particularly among the pulp and paper and other forest products makers.

At the Energy Trust of Oregon (ETO), the costs and process of ISO 50001 certification are being explored through a pilot program with a SolarWorld and Genentech manufacturing plant in Hillsboro. Both plants in the pilot receive consulting support and have the auditing and certification costs covered by ETO.

ISO 50001 is being evaluated in the pilot to understand how close the standard is to ETO’s current Strategic Energy Management program in addition to evaluating the functionality, value, and costs of implementing ISO 50001. One of the intents of ISO 50001 is for an energy manager to become permanent in a manufacturing plant. After seeing three energy champions trained by ETO be relocated, Kim Crossman, Industry and Agriculture Sector Lead at ETO, sees conformance with ISO 50001 as a possible mechanism to prevent personnel changes from unwinding energy management at a plant; “The beauty of conformance with ISO 50001 is that an energy management system becomes more deeply embedded in the organization, which should overcome the loss of a single champion due to people moving.”

Crossman believes the emergence of energy management is something that is still in its beginning stages, and a performance based innovation in how energy-efficiency is achieved in industry.

Engaging Manufacturers

Manufacturers’ engagement with utility DSM programs—whether to receive technical assistance, incentives, or other benefits—depends in part on the  value that  manufacturing customers receive from those programs. As ISO 50001 gains wider adoption, utilities may face greater requests from their customers for assistance in implementing the standard. ISO 50001 offers a fresh opportunity for utilities to implement holistic program design that can help their customers become more competitive and continually improve their energy performance.