The Retail Challenge: Doing More With Less; Reduce Energy Use, Not Customer Satisfaction

By Paige Kindell, vice president, resource management solutions, Ecova

A common misconception is that you have to have a large portfolio of locations to affect real change when it comes to energy reductions. Whether you have 50 or a thousand locations, each day you have an opportunity to capture savings in your energy expense. For retailers, electricity is one of your top operational expenses, with lighting and HVAC accounting for the bulk of costs. Fortunately, these expenses also offer opportunities for substantial savings. There are three key ways to reduce these costs: developing a strategic and long term approach to reduce demand, implementing programs to influence employee behavior, and implementing an energy supply management strategy to focus on driving down unit cost.

You can still catch up with Part 1.