One of my newsletter readers, A.M., wrote from New Zealand with a series of questions about ISO50001, the management-systems standard for energy management. He has just started to get to grips with the 2018 edition. Here are his questions and my answers:

A.M.: How we distinguish between boundaries and scope? if boundary is simply the physical borders for the system (e.g. the office buildings), what is scope then? and if scope is for example “transportation” and etc., why in SEU [significant energy use] we say “Transportation” could be an SEU as a process?

V.V.: “Scope” means the range of activities covered. For example “manufacturing processes” or “heating, ventilation and air conditioning” or, as you say “transportation”. Within transportation you might have, for example, “freight” as an SEU, but equally you could declare all transport as significant. There is no paradox here.

A.M.: In the new edition, the top management shall take all the responsibilities that the representative had in the last edition. This sounds impossible to delegate all the tasks to the top management. How do we cope with this?

V.V.: If you are responsible for a task you can delegate it but still keep responsibility, i.e., it is your fault if the people you delegated it to fail to carry it out properly. Managers are accountable for the actions of subordinates.

A.M.: In section 4.3, page 8, after b) we have a statement “The organization shall not exclude an energy type within the scope and boundaries” I do not understand the idea! why we are not allowed to do so?

V.V.: The requirement seems logical to me. For one example: if you have transport as your scope and you have plug-in hybrid vehicles, it is reasonable to insist that you cannot exclude any electricity used by them. Another example: if you had an oil-fired boiler and replaced it with a wood-fired one, it would evidently be wrong to exclude the wood fuel from consideration.

A.M.: If a new opportunity would become replacing diesel boiler with wood pellet, it means we are changing the energy types which does not necessarily reduce the energy costs. Can we call it action plans?

V.V.: ISO50001 is about managing energy performance, not costs or carbon. If substituting a different fuel improves the energy performance, it will contribute to your aims and objectives, so it would make sense to classify the work as an action plan.

A.M.: I understand that for each energy type, we identify SEU(s) and for each SEU, we list the action plans. What if one action plan reduces diesel and increases electricity? Do we still keep it as an action plan for diesel?

V.V.: What matters is the overall energy performance. If the amount of electricity consumption that you add exceeds the amount of diesel energy saved, your energy performance would be worse after the project and it would therefore make no sense to include the project in an action plan within your EnMS. If the project is going to improve energy performance, you could declare it as part of an action plan.