How Well Is Your Estate Really Managing Energy, Cost and Carbon?
A five-minute energy performance self-assessment to find out where you stand – and where to start
Most estate and facilities teams know they could be doing more on energy. The harder question is knowing where to begin. With complex portfolios, competing priorities and constrained budgets, it’s easy to keep waiting for the perfect project or the perfect dataset before taking action.
That’s exactly the gap our new Energy Performance Self-Assessment is designed to close. It’s a free, five-minute tool that gives you an instant, honest snapshot of how your estate is performing across the areas that matter most, and a clear starting point for what to tackle next.
What is the Energy Performance Self-Assessment?
It’s a short online questionnaire – 15 questions across five key areas – that scores your estate out of 30 and places you in one of three performance bands. At the end, you receive a breakdown showing where your estate is performing well and where the biggest opportunities to cut cost, reduce carbon and improve comfort are likely to be.
The five areas it covers are:
- Energy Efficiency – visibility of where energy is used and wasted
- Carbon vs Cost Alignment – linking carbon savings to measurable cost reduction
- Building Performance & Occupant Experience – comfort, air quality and responsiveness
- Data & Visibility – making decisions on live data rather than assumptions
- Strategy & Long-term Planning – readiness for tightening regulation and rising costs
It takes less than five minutes, and there’s no audit, no site visit and no obligation.
Why does a self-assessment matter when the answers seem obvious?
Because for most organisations, the barrier to progress isn’t ambition – it’s clarity. As we argued in The Carbon Reduction Excuse is Over, the technology, funding routes and expertise needed to reduce energy use already exist. What holds estates back is internal momentum: waiting for the right capital project, uncertainty about estates data, and competing day-to-day demands.
Energy efficiency rarely begins with transformation. It begins with attention. When estates data becomes structured and visible, inefficiencies tend to reveal themselves surprisingly quickly – and with that visibility comes the ability to prioritise. The self-assessment is a deliberately low-effort way to create that first moment of attention.
Will a five-minute quiz really tell me anything useful?
It won’t replace a detailed energy audit, and it isn’t meant to. What it does well is give you a structured, estate-wide view in minutes rather than months, and a sense of which of the five areas is dragging your performance down.
It will tell you that sequencing matters. In A Staged Approach to Decarbonisation, we explained why so many decarbonisation strategies underperform: not because they’re wrong, but because they’re delivered in the wrong order. Renewables get installed before demand is reduced. New plant is added before control issues are fixed. Capital is committed before there’s a clear performance baseline. The five sections of the assessment mirror the logical order of that staged approach – start by understanding performance, find the waste, scale the quick wins, then invest where the data points you.
What do I get at the end?
You’ll see an overall score, your performance band, and a short, tailored summary. Crucially, it gives you something you can act on – and something you can share. A clear, common view of your estate is a useful starting point for opening up internal discussions about priorities, or for a more focused conversation with a partner like us.
That focus on action is the whole point. As we set out in Energy Reporting in Education Estates, one of the most common failures across estates is the disconnect between insight and action – reports get produced, circulated, and quietly filed away while inefficiencies persist. Good reporting, and a good assessment, should always answer one simple question: what do we do next?
Who is the tool for?
It’s built for the people responsible for getting more from asset-heavy, high-energy estates – estate and facilities managers, sustainability leads and finance directors. It’s particularly relevant across the public sector, where reporting is often fragmented and where energy now represents one of the largest controllable operational costs.
If you manage schools, civic buildings, leisure centres or a mixed portfolio, the assessment will help you see where performance is strong and where it’s quietly slipping. It also reinforces a point we make often: that energy, carbon and cost are inherently connected and should be managed together, not in isolation.
Is sustainability really worth the effort right now?
With energy prices volatile and regulation steadily tightening, reducing energy consumption is no longer just a sustainability ambition – it’s an operational resilience strategy. Every year without meaningful efficiency improvement carries a financial cost, and the gap between estates that are improving and those that aren’t continues to widen.
The encouraging part is that progress doesn’t require waiting for perfect conditions. It begins with movement – and a five-minute assessment is about as small a first step as you can take.
A note on what this assessment is – and isn’t
It’s worth being clear about the tool’s purpose. The Energy Performance Self-Assessment is designed to give you a quick snapshot and a starting point for conversations – nothing more. It is not a substitute for a formal energy audit or a detailed assessment carried out by a qualified energy and sustainability professional, and its results shouldn’t be used as the sole basis for investment or compliance decisions. Think of it as the prompt that helps you decide where to look more closely, not the in-depth review itself.
Ready to get started?
You can take the Energy Performance Self-Assessment here. It’s free, takes under five minutes, and gives you an immediate, tailored result.
And if your score surfaces something you’d like to explore further, that’s where we come in – DMA Group works with organisations to turn that first snapshot into a practical, staged plan that reduces cost, cuts carbon and improves how their buildings perform.
The tools and expertise to reduce energy use already exist. The only real question left is: how much longer can your estate afford to wait?
