Data drives energy efficiency more than ever in 2026. Advanced energy analytics can help your business track performance, pinpoint inefficiencies and optimise your operations for maximum savings and reduced environmental impact.
This is also the case with your compliance reporting. The government mandates different forms of reporting across sectors, including Estates Return Information Collection in the NHS, Home Energy Conservation Act reports for local authorities, or SECR for companies consuming over 40MWh of energy per year.
Compliance reporting can seem like an overwhelming task – but it doesn’t have to be. Let’s talk about what data you should be considering.
Which areas should you consider reviewing in 2026?
There are a number of metrics that you can review as an Energy Manager in order to improve your energy usage across your portfolio and reduce your operating costs, including:
- Total Consumption: Your topline energy usage matters, as you use more, you spend more. Understanding your total consumption allows you to benchmark against historical performance and industry standards, as well as contributing to a baseline for compliance reporting and sustainability targets.
- Energy Costs: The cost of energy can fluctuate in real time, meaning that you could be paying more than you need to if you don’t have an up-to-date supplier contract, have overview on tariff structures and the non-commodity costs that can add up on your bill. This will allow you to budget forecast effectively and optimise your spending.
- Time of Use (ToU) data: Allowing you to pinpoint when you are using the most energy and when prices are most expensive. By having deep understanding of your usage through metering, you can ensure the most intensive hours are charged at a cheaper rate.
- Operational data: Reviewing operational data allows you to ensure that your business is running effectively and background costs are kept to a minimum. Lighting, heating and cooling all add to your bottom line, so reductions in these areas can greatly benefit your business.
- On-site generation: Creating your own energy, through technologies such as Solar PV, can greatly reduce costs and reliance on the National Grid. SystemsLink’s integration with OnGen allows you to identify the technologies that are most suitable for you based on your own data. If you already have on-site technologies, you should be reviewing how much you generate vs how much you use and export to the grid and whether you get alerts when the technology fails or performance is reduced.
- Carbon emissions: Reporting and understanding your carbon emissions ensures that you remain compliant with government regulations such as ESOS, SECR. Failure to do so can result in fines, negatively impacting your businesses reputation and available funds.
How can SystemsLink help you?
Accurate and accessible data is the foundation of effective compliance reporting. With SystemsLink’s Analytics dashboards, you immediately have vital data at your fingertips – empowering you to make informed decisions and ensure compliance.
We can customise dashboards to match your specific requirements and performance indicators, minimise the resources you need to extract and understand the data, and pinpoint patterns and trends in your energy usage.
You won’t be doing this alone either! Our skilled implementation team will work with you to assess exactly what you need and which metrics are the most important to you.
Here are some of the specific functions you can find on our dashboards:
- Generation performance: Visualise your generation profile, onsite consumption and grid export. Grasp your overall site demand, power generation, savings and generated revenue.
- Portfolio performance: Get a comprehensive overview of your estate’s energy consumption, carbon output and expenditure so you can track your sites against targets.
- Smart Spaces: Stop energy from going to waste with the most sophisticated AMR alarm system in the UK! Designed for large portfolios, Smart Spaces sends an email to a designated site contact, so you don’t have to be present yourself to make a difference in your organisation’s energy use.
- Web portal access: Allowing you to streamline your energy management through a number of different widgets, including: Footprint Reports; League Tables and Target Gauge.
- Profile explorer: Examine your half-hourly consumption data at both company and site levels with tidy comparison tools to analyse usage patterns – helping you detect anomalies.
Would you like to see all this in action?
Let’s talk about how we can help you supercharge your sustainability goals and boost your reporting – please book your demo here.
