A little light reading

DATELINE 1 APRIL 2015: Got your shopping basket and cheque-book ready? Let’s build that library of energy-management systems standards!

We’ll start with ISO 50001 “Energy management systems. Requirements with guidance for use” at £174 (or bizzarely, £12 less for the laminated version), and to make sure we implement it correctly, fork out £212 for ISO 50004 “Energy management systems. Guidance for the implementation, maintenance and improvement of an energy management system”. To help us understand it all we might add PD CEN/CLC TR 16103 “Energy management and energy efficiency. Glossary of terms”. That’s only an extra £152 but we can probably pass up on ISO 9229 “Thermal insulation. Vocabulary” (£200) especially as the subject seems also to be covered in the cheaper ISO 9251  “Thermal insulation. Heat transfer. Conditions and properties of materials. Vocabulary” at just £90.

Stay with me… Next, we will almost certainly want to do some energy audits. ISO 50002:2014 ED1 “Energy audits. Requirements with guidance for use” would seem to cover the ground, and at £103 it’s £5 less than the European Standard EN 16247-1 “Energy audits. General requirements”. But – decisions, decisions – EN 16247 also boasts other sub-standards: Part 2 for buildings at £192; Part 3, processes at £146; and Part 4, transport at £104 (the prices differ because they charge per page). If we want to use benchmarking we could pick up a copy of EN 16231 “Energy efficiency benchmarking methodology” for only £152, and thinking about the qualifications of the people doing the work we should add PAS 51215 “Energy efficiency assessment. Competence of a lead energy assessor. Specification”, which at £70 seems quite good value until you read it.

Swap your shopping basket for a trolley now, because we’re going to think about measuring and verifying our savings. To set the scene, let’s fork out £212 on EN 16212 “Energy Efficiency and Savings Calculation, Top-down and Bottom-up Methods”. Please suppress the thought that probably crept into your mind on seeing the words “up” and “bottom” in the title of one of these worthy publications, especially as we will see them again when we splash out £146 on CWA 15693 “Saving lifetimes of energy efficiency improvement measures in bottom-up calculations”.  Then to be on the safe side let’s get ISO 50015 “Energy management systems. Measurement and verification of energy performance of organizations. General principles and guidance” at £152, plus ISO 50006 “Energy management systems. Measuring energy performance using energy baselines and energy performance indicators. General principles and guidance”  (£174). Nearly done… To make sure that our efforts to comply with all this stuff are up to scratch, let’s round off with £146 for ISO 50003 “Energy management systems. Requirements for bodies providing audit and certification of energy management systems”.

All in all, the bill could be over £2,000. There is no truth in the rumour that the International Standards Organisation, British Standards, and the Comité Européen de Normalisation are contemplating a joint venture to be called “ISO, BS and CEN Enterprises” or ISOBSCENE.