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Archive for the ‘ESCO’ Category

Publish all heat tariffs

Posted in data, district heating, energy, ESCO on January 24, 2019| Leave a Comment »

Some customers on UK heat networks pay way over the odds for their heat but because heat networks are natural monopolies there’s little they can do about it. Sure, we can introduce some direct competition on heat networks (for example by making it possible to switch out the metering and billing provider) but the opportunities are pretty limited.

While direct competition between suppliers is limited, it is possible to introduce virtual competition between suppliers by making the cost to customers transparent and available to everyone. In fact our best opportunity by far to apply competitive pressure in the heat market is to publish tariffs, including unit and standing charges, in a central, publicly available register.

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Want to reduce standing charges on heat networks? End capital contributions

Posted in district heating, ESCO, zero carbon, tagged , on October 9, 2017| 1 Comment »

Capital contributions, the payments made by ESCOs to developers in exchange for long-term concession agreements, are a hangover from the days when everyone thought onsite generation would be highly profitable.

We’ve since discovered that it isn’t as lucrative as expected. Nevertheless developers continue to demand these upfront payments, leading to higher standing charges, longer contracts and unhappy residents. Isn’t it time for the practice to stop?

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Linking heat networks raises tricky questions

Posted in biomass, chp, district heating, ESCO, heat pumps on September 19, 2016| 1 Comment »

A few weeks ago, my business partner and I were walking to a meeting in Stratford when we realised we were surrounded by several heat networks (seven actually): each one standing alone, isolated from its neighbours, each dependent on its own small boilers or CHP, each its own tiny monopoly. Seven networks right next to each other, brazenly missing the opportunity to reduce cost and carbon by linking together.

Here he his, pointing them out:

 

 

The scene on that Stratford street corner highlights a failure of coordination on the part of planners and a lack of incentives to link small heat networks to each other and to larger-scale sources of low-carbon heat.

But what if we put it right? Imagine for a minute that we do stitch together groups of small networks, perhaps using the £320 BEIS funding to do it. Technically it might be straightforward, but what about commercial structure? What do you do with all those little monopolies?

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answering Bill Watts’ awkward questions

Posted in chp, district heating, engineering, ESCO on October 29, 2015| 5 Comments »

Last week, Bill Watts at M&E practice Max Fordham wrote a passionate rant against CHP and heat networks on the Construction Manager website.

The crux of Bill’s message is that real world losses on new build projects are higher than losses calculated using manufacturers’ specs and SAP. How much higher? Bill’s not sure – he says that only ESCOs know how well or how poorly heat networks are working. But in any case “much higher than we’ve been led to believe.”

A few days after the original article appeared, Construction Manager ran a follow up piece in which people from the building industry try to rebut Bill’s argument. In general the respondents make the case that CHP and DH have an important role to play in decarbonising heat, with several highlighting that the Heat Network Code of Practice should improve the performance of new networks.

But in my view the industry respondents missed the key point.

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unlikely heroes: how the humble meter holds the key to better heat network performance

Posted in district heating, energy, engineering, ESCO, tagged , on October 14, 2014| Leave a Comment »

I’ve done a blog post for the CHPA in the run up to the Heat 2014 conference on 5 November. Here’s the intro and link:

Metering and billing (M&B) is often seen as a necessary but rather dull cog in the district heating machine. For many heat network operators, heat metering is nothing more than a tool for ensuring customers are billed for the heat they consume. But it’s far more important than that. Heat metering can be used to monitor network efficiency, which can spell life or death for district heating schemes. Unfortunately, getting this performance data out of heat meters isn’t always easy…

Read the rest here.

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getting district heating wrong: Part 3 – Operation

Posted in district heating, energy, engineering, ESCO, smart metering on January 8, 2014| Leave a Comment »

This is the fifth post in a series on district heating. Here’s where to find  1, 2, 3 and 4.

So far we’ve looked at how poor design, installation or commissioning can doom a DH network to poor efficiency. In this post, I’ll briefly outline why it’s important to monitor and look after a DH network throughout its life, and what can go wrong if you don’t.

Most DH systems are commissioned and then ignored. It may be many months or even several years before anyone revisits the scheme to look closely at how it’s operating, usually prompted by something going badly wrong. The first casualty of network neglect is efficiency.

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why efficiency is biggest issue for district heating

Posted in district heating, energy, engineering, ESCO, utilities on November 25, 2013| Leave a Comment »

This is the second post in a series on DH. The first can be found here.

As I mentioned in my previous post, cost of heat on DH schemes is directly tied to system efficiency. The more efficient the system, the less fuel is needed to meet the heat requirements of the customers. And of course the reverse is also true: lower efficiency means higher cost of heat. This relationship between efficiency and cost is hugely important: it’s real cash, coming from residents to pay their heating bills and from the landlord or ESCO to pay the fuel bill.

In fact, I’d go as far as saying that efficiency is the single most important issue for DH schemes. This post explains why efficiency matters so much.

heat-price-by-losses1

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DECC pays for Big 6 intelligence gathering

Posted in ESCO, smart metering, utilities, tagged , , , on January 16, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Last year the Energy Technologies Institute launched the £100m  Smart System and Heat Programme, which “aims to design a first of its kind Smart Energy System in the UK.” As part of this programme, they’re doing a £3m piece of research into consumer behaviour on heat networks.

A member of the research team got in touch this week to ask if she could come in for a chat about what behaviour trends we’re seeing at Insite, our metering and billing company that looks after around 7k customers on community heating schemes. She was really nice about it and we began to talk about potential dates for the meeting.

Then, as we talked on the phone, some other details began to emerge. Would ETI agree to show us interim results? No, interim results are typically only reported internally to ETI. What about final results? Well, maybe, it depends on whether the ETI members choose to release the results to the public – but there’s a good chance the results will not be released.

I was stunned. For clarity ETI is 50% funded with public money from BIS, DECC, TSB and EPSRC.

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little progress on license light?

Posted in chp, ESCO, london, private wire, utilities, tagged , , on June 25, 2012| Leave a Comment »

As summarised in earlier posts, license light is pretty much the only tool in OFGEM’s toolbox to allow small scale generation schemes to get value for the electricity they generate. It’s nothing to do with subsidies or guaranteed prices or feed in tariffs. Instead license light is trying to redress the fact that our electricity market just isn’t a level playing field. The big companies can afford to play, while small time (usually low carbon) generators are squeezed out.

I noted in the earlier post that the GLA were working on a pilot to trial license light. They had hoped to get the license light toolkit and sample contracts published by end of March 2012. This hasn’t happened.

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will “license light” boost local generation?

Posted in chp, ESCO, london, private wire, utilities, tagged , , , , , on March 13, 2012| 2 Comments »

On-site generation only works if you get good value for the energy you produce. For example, the viability of CHP (and the resulting cost of heat) depends on the price you get for the electricity you generate.

So what are your options? You could export to the grid under an offtake contract with a licensed electricity supplier. But as a small generator your electricity is almost worthless to them so they won’t pay much for it: maybe 2 or 3p. So unless you’re able to negotiate a particularly sweet contract, this is usually a non-starter.

The obvious route should be to sell energy directly to people on the site where the energy is generated. That’s supposed to be the point of distributed energy, right? (more…)

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