Convenience Store Chain Rings Up $28M in Savings

Challenge

Throughout years of record growth, this leading global convenience store has maintained its focus on operating responsibly and minimizing its environmental footprint. As the business grew, they sought to accelerate their approach to scale best practices and solutions across the portfolio. To realize this vision, this convenience store engaged ENGIE Impact to inform their strategy, ensure seamless execution, and track progress across energy, water, waste, and carbon reduction programs.

Solution

This global convenience store engaged ENGIE Impact to gather advanced performance analytics, global expertise, and local market knowledge. This partnership’s success hinged on three pillars: Data-driven opportunity evaluation, integrated execution, and consistent reporting.

Data-Driven Opportunity Evaluation

ENGIE Impact brought a wide range of expertise to help the convenience store evaluate a range of opportunities to inform their strategy, including:

• Energy and water efficiency projects. From proven projects like LED retrofits or innovative systems like eco-coolers and smart temperature sensors, ENGIE Impact evaluated project cost, projected savings, and available rebates to inform capital expenditures.
• Renewable energy. Evaluate local markets for federal, state, and local incentives, access to commercial lease options or power purchase agreements, net energy metering access, and ideal areas for cost-effective battery storage based on demand charges and tariff structure.
• Electric vehicle charging. Evaluate ideal placement based on customer preferences, local codes, installation and equipment costs, and available incentives and funding programs (e.g. Electrify America).
• Waste management. Collected extensive data on waste, tonnage and service frequency, providing insights on right-sizing, diversion opportunities, and procurement savings.

Integrated Execution

When implementing efficiency measures, a common barrier to value capture is often communication across siloed departments.

ENGIE Impact served as a central communication hub, ensuring that when changes occurred, related services were changed too. When consumption decreased, revisions were made to supply contracts, when new incentives became available, they were incorporated into ongoing retrofits, and when sites were open or closed, first or final invoices were paid.

When projects proved highly successful, ENGIE Impact shared the calculations to help validate the business case for other regions and business units. As this convenience store continued to invest, savings grew exponentially, with more proven technologies and best practices integrated in every project.

Consistent Performance Tracking

The key to a successful program across a global, decentralized portfolio is consistent tracking and reporting of initiative performance. Throughout this partnership, ENGIE Impact:

1. Tested innovative new technologies or programs through representative pilots
2. Measured performance at the site or across the portfolio, spanning energy or water consumption, waste generation, or GHG emissions
3. Maintained savings by identifying and acting on costly equipment issues or leaks
4. Reported progress to employees, customers, board of directors, and investors

Results

Over the past 5 years, this global convenience store has seen the following impacts:

• 17.9% electricity reduction
• 44% water reduction
• $28M in avoided costs
• 10.7% reduction in GHG emissions
• First sustainability report released