An energy audit is an examination of the organisation's energy-management processes and procedures, including: how data are collected, analysed and reported; how energy-saving opportunities are prioritised and pursued; what training, motivation and awareness programmes are in place, and so on.
Energy targets: this is a term with two legitimate but different meanings. Corporate targets are set at site or enterprise level on a top-down basis. They are aspirational and usually arbitrary, and refer to the reduction expected ("thou shalt save 15% over the next five years"). In this sense, exceeding your target is good. In monitoring and targeting schemes, however, "target" consumption might better be described as expected consumption. Such performance targets relate to individual monitored streams and can be estimated on the basis of precedent, or from a knowledge of how consumption relates to the weather, production activity, or other driving factor. They should be set at the lowest level that is demonstrably achievable and should be revised whenever there is evidence that they can or should be. Exceeding your target consumption is bad.
Benchmarks and yardsticks: for some purposes, usually for reporting against corporate targets, performance indicators are used. In buildings this might be a normalised performance indicator (NPI), typically the weather-corrected kWh per year per square metre of lettable floor space. In process applications, kWh per unit of production output can be used. This is called the Specific Energy Ratio (SER) Personally I don't like NPIs and SERs because although they might be a useful shorthand for high-level reporting, they are worse than useless as day-to-day management metrics.
Be that as it may, some people use the term "benchmark figure" synonymously with "performance indicator" (the actual measured NPI or SER). The benchmark is actually the desired NPI or SER. Is this the same as the yardstick NPI or SER? I would say not; a yardstick is any reference NPI or SER, so for example you could say you had yardsticks for poor and good performance respectively. Benchmark performance might be better than a published 'good' yardstick value, if you have evidence that it can be achieved.
Benchmarking is a process that goes beyond dividing one figure by another. So if an energy manager is told to benchmark his or her buildings annually, it does not just mean calculate their NPIs and dream up some excuses for them being the wrong side of a "good" yardtsick. It means actively studying the best performers, using their attributes as the benchmark for the stragglers in the hope that lessons can be learned.
Vilnis Vesma 18 September, 2005