Do I need to do both ESOS and Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting (“SECR”)?

The Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting legislation (aka “SECR”) is beginning to make its presence felt in the board room and with such a large crossover with ESOS, a question we get from many of our clients is “Does SECR replace ESOS?” or, alternatively, “Do I need to do both SECR and ESOS?”.   The simple answer is “yes” if you qualify for them, i.e., if you qualify for ESOS you will need to do ESOS and if you qualify for SECR you need to do SECR and just because you are doing one it does not mean you can ignore the other.  Sorry.

Different criteria for ESOS and SECR

As a reminder, the qualification criteria for SECR are different than those for ESOS.  In summary, you need to participate in SECR if:

1. You are a listed company, or

If you answer “yes” to two or three of the following:

1. You have over 250 staff
2. You have over £36 million turnover
3. You have over £18 million gross balance sheet assets (NB not “Net Assets”)

Most of our ESOS clients need to do SECR as well.  If this applies to you as well, then this is obviously going to mean incurring additional cost every year for your SECR assessment but if you are doing both SECR and ESOS you should see a reduction in your 4-yearly ESOS fee as most of the analysis required for ESOS is done as a part of SECR already.

How to best approach doing both ESOS and SECR together

In terms of the best way to approach things if you are required to do both SECR and ESOS, one way seems to be proving more popular than others.  This is to continue to provide the same data that you supplied for ESOS on a monthly/quarterly basis so we can use it as the backbone of your SECR report, i.e. just keep the data flowing to us.  This has some significant advantages:

1. For larger clients, getting all of the required data is not simple (nor quick) and now that they have processes in place, they can just keep those processes running rather than stopping them now and then go through the pain of re-introducing them later for SECR.
2. Spotting and fixing gaps in data as we go along is obviously easier than addressing problems that may have happened over a year ago. For our risk-adverse clients, this means that there is less of a chance of having missing data than if we did it the whole report retrospectively with the entire data for the year sent to us in one block at the end of the SECR period.
3. Having Plato, our energy management platform, kept up to date allows us to produce interim monthly or quarterly reports on your energy use. Some clients, specifically those with a significant energy spend, value this information as they can see the effect of their energy saving measures immediately rather than having to wait until the end of the year.

Conclusion

So, in conclusion, “yes” you need to do both ESOS and SECR if you qualify for both and the most cost-effective and lowest risk approach is to keep the energy data flowing through to us once ESOS Phase 2 finishes and your SECR analysis period commences.

Want more information?  Download our guide “Top 5 Tips On How To Make The Most Out Of ESOS”

Enistic help companies manage their energy and have been doing so since 2009.  We are market leaders in ESOS auditing, energy monitoring via meters of all forms and we carried out over 2,000 ESOS site audits during ESOS phase 1.  We develop and maintain Plato, a cloud-based Energy Management Platform that helps a large number of medium-sized and Enterprise level organisations manage their energy in real-time throughout the world, including several listed companies.  We are based in Oxford but have distributors worldwide and have national reach when it comes to ESOS Audits.

If you would like more information about ESOS and see our Top 5 Tips On How To Make The Most Out Of ESOS, click here to download our guide.

Want some help?  Speak to Darryl Mattocks

Darryl is the founder of Enistic and has personally been the responsible ESOS Lead Assessor on over 250 ESOS Audits.  He advises on how to reduce energy use in over 2,000 sites throughout the UK and is doubly certified for ESOS by two independent ESOS approval bodies.   He is an approved ISO50001 Lead Auditor and holds the industry-specific CEM and CMVP qualifications awarded by the Association of Energy Engineers.

He is happy to answer any ESOS, SECR or energy management related questions you may have and can be contacted by email at darryl@enistic.com or by phone on 01865 598 776.