RBS/Citizens Bank – Stuart DeCew – 2010

Goals

Stuart DeCew spent this summer as an EDF Climate Corps fellow with RBS Citizens Financial Group and was based in the RBS Americas headquarter building. Citizens Financial Group, Inc. is a $140 billion commercial bank holding company with more than 1,500 branches in 12 states. A joint MBA/MEM student at Yale University, DeCew was asked to identify a number of  opportunities to reduce operating costs and energy consumption throughout the company’s portfolio of properties during the course of his fellowship.

Solutions

Throughout the summer, DeCew focused his attention on identifying and analyzing a variety of energy efficiency projects at seven facilities that account for almost 20 percent of the company’s total energy use in the US. 

Potential Impact

With the support and guidance of RBS Citizens employees at these seven facilities, DeCew developed a comprehensive business case for significant financial investments in a number of energy efficiency initiatives. These initiatives have the potential to save the bank over $620,000 in annual energy and operating costs, reduce energy consumption by over 4,670,000 kWh and eliminate an estimated 2,338 metric tons of CO2 – the equivalent of removing almost 390 SUVs from the road.

In addition to these larger projects, DeCew worked with facilities managers, building engineers, maintenance technicians and with the environment and sustainability team at RBS Citizens to investigate a number of additional initiatives. These efforts could save an estimated $75,000 annually in energy costs, almost 550,000 kWh of energy use and eliminate 220 metric tons of CO2.

Finally, DeCew targeted a number of other properties for future energy efficiency audits, identified incentive programs to cover the cost of those audits and collaborated with RBS Citizens employees to supervise the audits on-site. These audits could lead to the discovery of energy efficiency investments in the future for the next EDF Climate Corps fellow to evaluate.