The Issue

When the Director of Energy and Sustainability at one of the largest quick-serve restaurants in the world was tasked with developing the strategy to achieve a 20% energy intensity reduction, Burton Energy Group was able to respond with exactly what their client needed and help develop their path forward.

Leveraging the organizational and technical knowledge that had been gained through a variety of consulting projects over previous years, Burton immediately went to work as a seamless extension of their energy management team.

The Burton Solution

Burton began by organizing calls with key stakeholders to gain their perspectives, establish buy-in, and develop internal champions within various departments. In the span of four months, Burton and the client’s energy team had developed a strategic approach to tackling the multi-year, 20% energy intensity reduction objective. Key elements
included:

• Documenting headwinds and tailwinds and their resulting impact on the portfolio and goal feasibility.
• Multiple key strategies in the areas of lighting, HVAC, kitchen equipment, and operational practices.
• A multi-year energy upgrade investment strategy coupled with an overall project ROI to help sell the project to senior leadership.

The overall framework was ultimately used to communicate the approach in a logical and data-driven manner to show the feasibility, capital cost, and overall business return. After completing the US model, the framework was ultimately adopted by several other international business units and Burton was retained to assist in the development of their unique strategies.

Upon successful adoption of the strategy, capital funding was made available to begin demonstrating and vetting the seven key initiatives that formed the foundation of the 20% reduction program. Burton quickly went to work to assemble site-level prioritization which included internal portfolio priorities, regional energy prices, state and utility incentive programs, and available capital.

Many of the reduction measures involved new technologies and business processes that the client had not previously deployed. Because of this, Burton assisted them in identifying and vetting key implementation partners who could help deliver the solution nationally. While the supplier and technology testing was underway, Burton provided the technical resources required to complete early site audits, business cases, and demonstration projects to better understand the scope and challenges these new business partners would face.

In addition, measurement of actual energy savings was also identified as an initial priority. Measuring actual savings using detailed equipment-level submetering against the expected savings in the original model was critical to receiving future capital investment as well as refining prior assumptions. Burton brought together several approaches to capture this circuit-level submetering data in real-time as well as analysis frameworks to understand and draw conclusions from the data.

Finally, organization and display of the results was needed to communicate the value achieved to multiple levels in the client organization. To meet these needs, Burton utilized the Energy Strategy Platform (ESP) which provides feedback on overall energy intensity, measures and verifies results of completed projects, and provides an easy way to find the relative energy performance of restaurants in the portfolio.