Action stations: ESOS 3 presents fleet sustainability opportunity

The Energy Saving Opportunity Scheme (ESOS) has moved into its action plan phase, presenting both challenges and opportunities for fleet operators. As Stephen Fitter from Focus Net Zero explains, this mandatory assessment is revealing surprising insights about fleet sustainability efforts and the potential for significant energy and cost savings…

The Energy Saving Opportunity Scheme (ESOS) passed its compliance deadline in early August and is now moving on to the action plan stage. For those that are not aware of what ESOS is, it is a periodic mandatory assessment on large organisations’ energy use. For many of these, fleet operations are the largest consumer of energy and emitter of CO2e in their business.

As an auditor for the scheme, I assessed 45 different fleet operations preceding the 18 months before deadline. I looked at how they operated their vehicles and provided recommendations that they could look to implement to save energy and money. This proved to be a very interesting insight into where these businesses were at in terms of their sustainability journeys and the challenges they face.

What I saw was some very conscientious and forward-thinking operators who were trying to pull every lever they could to operate better, not only for the benefit of the environment but also to the benefit of reducing costs and improving margins. Cultures of sustainability permeated through these operations and two in particular, heavily promoted what they were doing and positioned it as a key selling point.

It will however be of no surprise though that there were quite a few that were doing nothing. Which is not only disheartening for the impact on the environment, but also on the business itself. In these cases, huge savings were up from grabs just by getting some of the basics in. Basics that good operators have been doing for years to reduce costs and provide a great service.

Of course, the majority were in the middle ground. In this category, some are very eager but either lacked the means, didn’t have implementation expertise, or had gaps in their knowledge of what could be done. Others wanted to do it all, but financial constraints and lack of ambition from business leadership were hindering action.

Recommendations

When thinking about decarbonisation of vehicles, switching to electric is often the first thing that springs to mind. However, there are many steps an organisation can take to reduce emissions and in fact our top recommendation for our clients was to improve data insight. In the majority of the cases, data availability and quality weren’t where they needed to be; to measure is to manage and therefore many had no idea how much they were using or had big gaps.

Our next highest recommendation was in driver training; some clients really nailed this with collaborative approaches with the drivers to incentivise them to drive the most fuel-efficient way. It was wonderful to see the different approaches adopted by those managers and the icing on the cake was that all of these had a low turnover of driving staff.

So, with savings of over 71million of kWh, 17k tonnes of CO2e, and £9m just from our clients, the scheme can certainly demonstrate its value. However, this is all well and good, but if everyone just gives the assessment a cursory look and shelves it, then nothing is improved. That is why this phase of ESOS is different. The legislation has changed, and participants now have to provide an action plan to show that they are doing something with the recommendations.

Next stage action plans

So where are we now? The next stage of ESOS is Phase 3 and involves submitting an action plan to the Environment Agency by the 5 March 2025. This plan must set out what you intend to do to reduce energy consumption, when you are going to do it, and how much you expect to save. What’s more, progress has to be reported on every year going forward. Plans and progress updates must be signed off by a board level director, and you will need to show your workings.

Thought needs to be put into these plans as they will be publicly published by the Environment Agency meaning if you do a bad job, or ignore the legislation, then it is available for anyone who wants to see it which could result in a reputational risk to the business.

It is understandable that for time-poor transport and fleet managers, this might be viewed as another administrative burden they could do without; however, a little bit of short-term pain will bring long term gain, not only in compliance but in doing the right thing for the planet, and also the bottom line.