With just three months until the deadline for compliance with the ESOS (Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme) Regulations 2014, just 152 organisations have notified the Environment Agency that they are fully compliant (sourced 25th August). This represents less than one percent of the 15,000 affected firms who need to comply.
As it can take-up to three months for an assessor to complete the mandatory audit, energy and environment consultancy, Savills Energy, is urging businesses that have yet to complete the process to make arrangements now to avoid the risk of fines and penalties.
As part of an EU wide drive to reduce carbon emissions, companies will need to identify energy saving opportunities across their buildings, transport and industrial processes. The deadline to provide evidence of a completed audit to the Environment Agency is 5th December 2015.
Stuart Campbell, director at Savills Energy, commented, “Businesses which fail to comply with ESOS could be fined up to £50,000, plus an additional £500 a day, every day the audit remains outstanding.
“We believe that many businesses in the UK required to comply could recover the financial outlay of recommended actions within two years. Rather than seeing the process as a bureaucratic hurdle to jump over and forget, proactive businesses will identify the energy efficiency improvements the audit sets out as a very efficient way of discovering business wide cost savings.”
Savills Energy has developed a specialist ESOS service to provide a structured approach to compliance and have produced a guide to ESOS compliance for businesses. This explains which organisations will need to undertake the assessment and what the process entails. The guide also outlines the penalty fees that will follow if businesses fail to comply by the deadline.
As part of the compliance process, Savills Energy also provides advice on achieving compliance with the Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards (MEES), and the Heat Network (Metering and Billing) Regulations.
