M&V will take on heightened importance as “cap and trade” legislation establishes a carbon trading market. While this is still an evolving area in the U.S., it is happening today in Europe. It’s only a matter of time before states such as California, or Congress, pass such legislation. When that does occur, organizations are going to want to get credit for their direct and indirect reduction of CO2 emissions. Certifiable M&V is the only way to realize this.

Koomey: On the telecommuting side of things, the potential is quite large, and as Dave points out, it’s not just energy and emissions savings. It also saves on office space. The AT&T folks have done excellent work on M&V on of their telecommuting programs. Here’s the abstract to a peer-reviewed paper on the effects of these programs.

I also strongly agree about the likelihood of “Aha!” moments when conducting simple audits and inventories of emissions and energy use. Typically people within companies will keep doing whatever has worked for awhile and not evaluate whether there are ways to do things better until there is a crisis or there is a directive from higher management. Doing these audits regularly will break through that stagnation and opportunities will become obvious.

These evaluations of opportunities should be periodic and ongoing. Some companies use Six Sigma in this way. The trick is to create cross-cutting teams of people who report to someone high up in management—not to individual department heads—whose sole job it is to identify opportunities. M&V is also critical for these folks—they should be evaluated not just on the opportunities they identify but on the successful capture of those opportunities and a retrospective look at what happened. Did the financial, energy and environmental savings measure up to the initial estimates?

Having high-level management attention is crucial. When Shell and BP set up their internal emissions trading systems for greenhouse gas emissions, one of the most important changes was making the leaders of each business unit report on their units’ progress in achieving the environmental goal when they were giving their annual briefing to the CEO.

Adams: I agree that every time you peel the energy-efficiency "onion," you discover more opportunities. At one of our smaller facilities we are conducting a test of software that sits on top of building-automation programs to optimize air flow. I am sure that measure will lead to another idea for potential savings.

Another example is our Flexible Work Program. We launched it two years ago, to boost employee morale. Employees could request compressed work weeks and telecommuting arrangements. Now, we’re taking it to the next level and looking at it much more from a business perspective, in terms of office space reduction. This isn’t about Friday telecommuting, it’s about analyzing roles within organizations and making decisions about the type of employee who can be set up in a home office, supported by IT.