BSI British Standards, along with the standards bodies of the USA (ANSI), Brazil (ABNT) and China (SAC) is to head up the development of an international standard on energy management, ISO 50001.
This future standard will establish a framework for all types of organisations in the industrial, commercial, institutional, large residential and transportation sectors, as well as emerging economies and SMEs, to manage their energy usage. It is estimated that the standard could target as much as 60 per cent of the world's energy use across national economic sectors.
Delegates from 25 countries attended the first meeting of the international committee and, says BSI, made 'excellent progress' in establishing a working draft document. In order to ensure compatibility with the existing suite of ISO management system standards, the draft document is based on common elements found in all of these. PAS 99 Specification of common management system requirements as a framework for integration is used as the basic framework document for the first working draft of ISO 50001, with the addition of energy-specific elements.
"BSI is proud to be working jointly with these three other national standards bodies on such an important project," said Mike Low, Director of BSI British Standards. "Energy management should be on every boardroom agenda and our aim is to use the vast experience we have of delivering environmental solutions to develop a standard which leads the way forward in this field."
The UK has made a significant contribution to the development of standards within the energy sector in recent years and is leading standardisation activity in a number of new areas. BSI proposed and leads a new International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) technical committee on wave and tidal energy and will soon publish PAS 2050, the specification for the assessment of the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions of goods and services.
