The International Standards Organization (ISO) has launched an effort to develop an international standard on energy management.
The standard will provide all types of organizations and companies a practical, widely recognized approach to increase energy efficiency, reduce costs, and improve environmental performance by addressing both the technical and management aspects of rational energy use.
The standard is intended to be broadly applicable to various sectors of national economies, including utility, manufacturing, commercial building, general commerce, and transportation sectors, and could affect up to 60 percent of the world’s energy demand.
Following the successful examples of the ISO 9000 series on quality management and the ISO 14000 series on environmental management, the project committee will consider developing a standard containing relevant terms and definitions and providing management-system requirements together with guidance for use, implementation, measurement, and metrics.
The committee will base the standard on the continual improvement and plan-do-check-act approach used in ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 to provide compatibility and integration opportunities.
Among the main benefits of the future standard:
• provide organizations and companies with a well-recognized framework for integrating energy efficiency into management practices
• offer organizations with operations in more than one country a harmonized standard for implementation across the organization
• provide a logical, consistent methodology for identifying and implementing improvements that might contribute to a continual increase in energy efficiency across facilities
• assist organizations to better use existing energy-consuming assets, reducing costs, and expanding capacity
• offer guidance on benchmarking, measuring, documenting, and reporting energy-intensity improvements and their projected impact on reductions
• create transparency and facilitate communication on the management of energy
• promote best practices in energy management, reinforcing the value of good energy-management behaviors
• assist facilities in evaluating and prioritizing the implementation of new energy-efficient technologies
• provide a framework for organizations to encourage suppliers to better manage their energy, promoting energy efficiency throughout the supply chain
• facilitate the use of energy management as a component of emission-reduction projects.
