Posted in climate change, energy, engineering, ESCO, PAYS, renewable energy, sustainability, utilities, zero carbon, tagged CLG, DECC, Supplier Obligation, UKGBC on February 22, 2010| 6 Comments »
In Whitehall, advocates of PAYS and an expanded suppliers obligation are clashing over which mechanism should be used to refurb existing housing. This is the second post of two. If you missed it, read the first part here.
Here’s a quick summary of the two mechanisms:
Posted in climate change, Code for Sustainable Homes, energy, engineering, ESCO, passivhaus, PAYS, renewable energy, sustainability, utilities, zero carbon, tagged CLG, DECC, HEMS, HESS, Supplier Obligation on February 14, 2010| 5 Comments »
Hitting the 80% carbon reduction by 2050 has huge implications (and costs) for the residential sector. Two strategies are emerging for dealing with these costs, each with its own potentially severe side effects.
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…)
Posted in ESCO, feed in tariff, private wire, utilities, zero carbon on June 29, 2009| Leave a Comment »
As Phil Clark pointed out in a comment on my last post, there’s a very good piece in Building on the disappearance of ESCOs. This is a subject near to my heart as I’m part of Fontenergy, an independent ESCO.
Posted in chp, energy, engineering, ESCO, private wire, renewable energy, sustainability, zero carbon on June 11, 2009| 1 Comment »
Most people who work in the built environment agree that ESCO stands for Energy Services Company. But that seems to be the only thing about ESCOs that everyone agrees on – the term can mean vastly different things to different people.
So what is an ESCO?
The short answer is: there’s no one answer. Here’s a rough list of the services that an ESCO might offer. Keep in mind that a company might provide all, some, or only one of these services and still call themselves an ESCO:
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