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Posts Tagged ‘OFGEM’

Capital contributions – the heat network loophole Ofgem must close

Posted in uncategorized, tagged , , on August 2, 2026| Leave a Comment »

I posted this on LinkedIn on 8 July 2026. Adding here for completeness. Utility Week then picked up the story and wrote this.

Remember the first time ESCOs appeared in the UK?

It was around 2007. Building regulations had begun to tighten and the government set out plans for all new homes to be zero carbon by 2016. Audacious planners began to flex their muscles, ratcheting up targets for onsite renewables. Developers, riding high on a property boom with no end in sight, were desperate to get on and build – in the same old way as they’d always done. They hated these new requirements for higher efficiency and low carbon energy.

Enter the ESCOs: onsite energy companies, big and small, promising to take the cost and headache away. They would design, build, own and operate onsite energy schemes for 25 years or more. And best of all, many ESCOs promised to pay the developer a cold lump of hard cash (called a capital contribution) for the privilege.

Everybody was a winner.

Except the resident.

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Why Ofgem must stick heads on pikes

Posted in district heating, uncategorized, utilities, zero carbon, tagged , , , on May 21, 2024| Leave a Comment »

With more than 14,000 heat networks coming under new regulations next year, Ofgem will have to take steps to ensure that, this time, heat network regulations are taken seriously.

The UK heat network industry hasn’t had much in the way of regulation up to now. The Heat Network (Metering and Billing) Regulations (or “HNMBR”), brought in in 2014, are the only purpose-built regs that UK heat networks have had. But unfortunately they’ve been ineffective.

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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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update on private wire

Posted in chp, private wire, renewable energy, tagged , , , , on October 15, 2008| 3 Comments »

Over recent weeks it’s become clearer which way the wind is blowing on private wire. Although BERR and OFGEM have set themselves an end-of-year deadline for finalising changes to the licensing regime, it’s possible to get a feel for which way they’re headed. Here are some of the key bits:

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BERR’s reaction to Citiworks: bad news for small generation in the UK?

Posted in chp, climate change, energy, micro chp, private wire, renewable energy, sustainability, utilities, wind turbines, tagged , , , on June 19, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Yesterday BERR and OFGEM released proposals for changing the way the electricity regulations work with regard to distributed energy generation. This is particularly important because it’s BERR’s first public reaction to the Citiworks ruling by the European Court of Justice two weeks ago.

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