While recovery from the “Great Recession” has loosened purse strings to fund many facility improvements, sustainability projects still have a hard time meeting organizational financial criteria. Most of the low-hanging “green fruit”, such as lighting upgrades, variable frequency drive installation, and economizer tuning, has been harvested, leaving the larger, more costly projects that cannot be justified through energy savings alone. For example, the next round of potential energy conservation measures include updating HVAC; unfortunately, the energy savings for such improvements return a payback roughly equal to the life expectancy of the equipment. Thus, in order to justify investment in such updates, facility managers need to leverage a more comprehensive business argument that couples energy savings with hard and soft cost benefits.
Read more, as published in the May/June 2017 edition of IFMA’s FMJ.
