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Archive for October, 2009

HELP WANTED: job at Fontenergy

Posted in uncategorized on October 28, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Things are picking up in the market. At Fontenergy, we’re run off our feet and will shortly need to expand the team. Right now, I’m looking for a consultant or engineer to work with me on DE and consulting projects.

(more…)

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low carbon development: ESCOs can take on all the extra cost, right?

Posted in Code for Sustainable Homes, energy, ESCO, feed in tariff, sustainability, utilities, zero carbon on October 7, 2009| 4 Comments »

Wrong. Unless they include extra charges.

The Code for Sustainable Homes, upcoming changes to building regs, and national emissions targets are all driving the industry towards much wider use of on-site generation.

Reducing carbon with on-site generation (also called “distributed energy” or just “DE”) brings extra costs relative to the business-as-usual approach of individual gas boilers and grid electricity. Cyril Sweett and others put the additional cost of building a zero-regulated-emissions house at £10k – £13k per dwelling, and some recent projects at work have borne this out.

This £10k – £13k is a massive problem for developers and housing associations, in some cases making projects infeasible.

There’s a widespread misconception that ESCOs can make the problem disappear. Some of this misconception has been fostered by ESCOs  keen to get deals on the books (I’ll come back to this in a minute), but I think most of the problem is down to a poor understanding of distributed energy and how ESCOs make money.

So how much capital cost can ESCOs take on? Here’s an example: (more…)

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