Zielo Orange

According to the BAFA information sheet, total energy consumption is calculated by determining 100 percent of the total final energy consumption of the company for the relevant period. It should include all energy, external and self-generated, consumed by the company across:

• Owned and self-occupied buildings and sites
• Leased buildings and sites used for business purposes
• All other energy consumers such as equipment, production processes, and vehicle fleets

No internal conversion or transmission losses occurring within company premises should be deducted, with the exception of energy consumption of partner or affiliated companies, as each obligated company is assessed individually.

Your Energy Management System should consider all energy sources used by the company during the relevant period, including electricity, natural gas, district heating, coal and other energy sources used for operations, processes, buildings, or transport. It should also include self-generated energy from renewable and non-renewable sources (with some exceptions). In summary, all final energy quantities consumed from all energy sources that support the company’s economic activities must be included.

In DIN ISO 50001, Significant Energy Users (SEUs) are facilities, systems, equipment, processes, or activities that account for a significant portion of the organisation’s energy use and/or have substantial potential for energy performance improvement. The standard requires companies to define SEUs through a structured energy review process which you can do by using our Zielo orange package to identify energy sources and energy uses, determine how and where energy is used across facilities, processes, systems, and equipment and determine significance using defined criteria. Furthermore, SEUs should be reviewed and updated periodically or when significant changes occur (e.g., new equipment, process changes, expansion).

The DIN ISO 50001 Standard does not prescribe a fixed threshold for SEUs. Instead, it requires that the method for identifying SEUs is defined, consistent, and documented and SEUs are used as a basis for setting energy performance indicators (EnPIs), objectives, and action plans.

A Sankey diagram or energy flow chart shows how energy comes into your company, how it is spread out across processes and systems, and where largest users and potential losses happen. This overview is helpful for the energy review, helps find Significant Energy Users, and makes it easier to see where improvements can be made in an ISO 50001 Energy Management System. The diagram gives you a clear, audit-ready picture of your energy performance by measuring the inputs, changes, and uses of energy within a set scope.

With our Zielo Orange modules, you can easily create this view. You only need to connect your energy invoice data and map energy flow once with processes and equipment. The system balances the flows of energy, costs, and CO2 in clear and easy-to-edit Sankey diagrams.

Although required to regularly and continuously evaluate and look for opportunities to improve efficiency in indentified SEUs, companies do not necessarily have to plan or implement these actions. To determine what efficiency measures should be added to the action plan and implemented, the companies need to perform an economic viability check based on the DIN EN 17463 (ValERI) standard to check which of them are legally required to be implemented.

DIN EN 17463 (ValERI) “Evaluation of energy-related investments” is a standard for calculating the enonomic viability of energy-saving measures. The norm sets a standard way to figure out how much energy-related investments will cost. It is required for ecological compensation, various legal requirements and for companies with operating energy management systems such as DIN EN ISO 50001.

DIN EN 17463 (ValERI) is important for companies in various sectors that are required to comply with regulations in the energy sector. This standard is particularly relevant for companies that need to ask for a cap on the levy under the Energy Industry Act (EnFG) or are required to set up an energy management system that meets the requirements of DIN EN ISO 50001 and/or the BEHG Carbon Leakage Regulation (BECV) and/or the specific criteria of the Electricity Price Compensation Act (SPK), which are based on a fixed list and do not depend on the capacity of the installed power plant.

Calculating viability according to ValERI DIN EN 17463 has many benefits for your company. It makes your efforts to save energy more clear, reliable, and useful. It also helps the company save money and reach environmental goals as it makes it easier to compare measures, think about risks and opportunities, and accurately judge scenarios and sensitivities. It also avoids inaccurate outcomes by looking at factors like the overall economical conditions, changes in prices and the time value of money.

DIN EN 17463 (ValERI) sets a standard way to look at the economic viability of energy-related investments, with a focus on results that are clear, easy to compare, and ready to make decisions about. Energy managers usually need tools that can figure out important financial numbers like Net Present Value (NPV), amortisation time, and Internal Rate of Return (IRR) in order to meet the standard. These tools also need to take into account costs of investment, costs of running the business, energy savings, lifetimes, and discount rates. Scenario and sensitivity analyses are also important for meeting regulatory and audit requirements and for understanding how changes in assumptions affect the outcome.

Our viability calculation module puts all the ValERI calculations you need in one easy-to-use tool. You don’t have to make complicated spreadsheets; you just enter your project data, and the platform automatically uses the DIN EN 17463 method. You can get standardised results, clear charts, scenario and sensitivity analysis, and professional reports with a few clicks. This makes economic evaluations faster, easier to understand, and easier to talk about with management and auditors.

Companies that use more than 2.5 GWh of energy a year (on average over the last three years), even if they have an ISO 50001 energy management system (EnMS), and  data centers with a nominal connected load of 300 kW or more, starting from 2027.

According to the requirements of the Energy Efficiency Act (EnEfG), companies that have to do so must annually check their waste heat potentials. This is so they can determine whether or not to publish the data on the BfEE platform.