At Adtran, we’ve been thinking about ways to optimize energy usage for decades. Most recently, our strategic energy management (SEM) initiative, in partnership with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), enabled us to save $283,413 in just two years. How did we achieve this without any upfront investment? The approach can be captured in one simple acronym: BEEP.

Introducing the BEEP framework

BEEP is a clear, practical and repeatable checklist that helped us roll out SEM across our Huntsville campus. We’re now extending this to Adtran sites in Atlanta, Germany and beyond. Here’s a breakdown of the framework.

• Benchmarking
  We map our energy performance across buildings using tools like ENERGY STAR® Portfolio Manager®. This gives us a baseline to prioritize quick wins and track progress over time.
• Establishing energy standards
  From HVAC scheduling to lighting retrofits, we aim for a consistent standard of energy performance. Aligning with the ISO 50001 standard helps us formalize those practices so they can be replicated across different sites.
• Employee awareness
  People are crucial drivers of any organizational change, so we use multilingual dashboards, regular goal-setting and live signage to keep energy top of mind across Adtran. The more visible the data, the more invested our team becomes.
• Planning and evaluating energy conservation measures
  Not every solution needs to be high-tech. We often focus on low- or no-cost measures, such as retro-commissioning and strategic audits. Every idea evaluated isn’t just for ROI, but for how well it fits our teams, company culture and long-term goals.

Scaling success across borders

As we expand SEM to our Atlanta operations and sites in Germany, our goal is to maintain the same energy-first culture we’ve nurtured at our Huntsville HQ while adapting to each location’s unique context.

It’s important that energy management teams start out with the same mindset: curiosity, accountability and a willingness to dig deeper. That’s how we found examples of energy wasted at our Huntsville HQ, such as unused servers. It’s fine after the fact to say that these should have been turned off earlier, but in large organizations, you often need to be actively looking at energy use across the company to catch waste that’s hiding in plain sight – energy that’s going to show up on your quarterly bill whether you benefit from it or not.

Beyond cash savings

At Adtran, our SEM program has helped us:

• Strengthen employee engagement
• Improve operational efficiency
• Build lasting partnerships
• Give back to our local community and encourage sustainability

Our success as part of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s two-year program demonstrates that strategic energy management can be a low-cost, low-risk, high-impact approach that any organization can adopt, regardless of size, sector or geography.

Whether you’re based in Atlanta, Anchorage or London, there are only two things you need to begin your SEM journey: a commitment to action and the ability to ask searching questions. Twenty years ago, that’s how I started my energy management career at Adtran. Today, I’m proud to report that this same mindset is still driving impactful change.