Washington, D.C. – Companies are pioneering new energy efficiency strategies that result in greater productivity, robust financial savings, and a lower carbon footprint. Leading firms that give greater attention to energy efficiency report billions of dollars in savings and millions of tons of avoided greenhouse gas emissions, according to the new report, “From Shop Floor to Top Floor: Best Business Practices in Energy Efficiency“, from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.
“Energy efficiency is smart business,” said Eileen Claussen, President of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. “In addition to dollar savings, companies that get serious about energy efficiency often realize other important benefits including improved corporate reputation, productivity increases, better worker morale and employee retention. In short, it is a winning solution for companies.”
Companies that have achieved the greatest success with their energy efficiency strategies share several key attributes. In this Pew Center report, author William R. Prindle of ICF International catalogues and describes these attributes, which include:
- A commitment to energy efficiency must start at the top. Strong leadership from senior managers, including the company CEO, is essential to getting an energy efficiency strategy started and sustaining it over time.
- Results can be maximized by expanding efficiency efforts to suppliers and customers. Many companies have found that much of their energy use and greenhouse gas emissions occur outside of their own direct operations. As a result, companies are reaching out across their value chain to tap into even larger energy savings opportunities.
- An emphasis on energy efficiency can lead to broader innovation and process improvements within a company. As companies in this study have found, the benefits of energy efficiency go beyond dollars saved and carbon emissions reduced; it can also lead to product quality and productivity improvements.
The report was developed over nearly two years of effort, including a detailed survey of the Pew Center’s Business Environmental Leadership Council (BELC) members and other leading companies, in-depth case studies of six companies, a series of workshops on key energy efficiency topics, broader research in the corporate energy field, and development of a full-featured Web portal to provide a platform for highlighting and updating key findings from the project as well as providing tools, resources, and other important information. The project was funded with generous support from Toyota.
“The companies featured in this report have achieved dramatic energy savings by following a relatively simple set of principles,” Claussen added. “Our hope is that other companies will learn from them and implement or strengthen their own efficiency initiatives.”
Key sections of the report include:
- The findings of the Pew Center’s 65-question energy efficiency survey, which was distributed to nearly 100 companies to gather quantitative data and discover trends in corporate energy efficiency;
- The Seven Habits of highly efficient companies, which distills the core elements of an exemplary corporate energy efficiency strategy into a set of core practices and principles;
- Best practices in internal operations, supply chain, and products and services, which focuses more specifically on techniques, tools, and other issues that have proven to be salient among the best energy efficiency strategies; and
- Six in-depth case studies of the energy efficiency efforts of Dow Chemical Company, United Technologies Corporation, IBM, Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America, Inc., PepsiCo and Best Buy.
The findings of the report were reviewed in depth at the Pew Center’s Energy Efficiency Conference taking place April 6-7 in Chicago.
Source: Pew Center, March 31, 2010
The Pew Center on Global Climate Change was established in May 1998 as a non-profit, non-partisan, and independent organization dedicated to providing credible information, straight answers, and innovative solutions in the effort to address global climate change. The Pew Center is led by Eileen Claussen, the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs.
The Business Environmental Leadership Council (BELC) was established by the Pew Center in 1998. It is comprised of mainly Fortune 500 companies representing a diverse group of industries including energy, automobiles, manufacturing, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, metals, mining, paper and forest products, consumer goods and appliances, telecommunications, and high technology. Individually and collectively, these companies are demonstrating that it is possible to take action to address climate change while maintaining competitive excellence, growth, and profitability. The BELC is the largest U.S.-based association of corporations focused on addressing the challenges of climate change, with 46 companies representing over $2.5 trillion in combined revenue and more than 4 million employees.
