Your energy costs are going through the roof. You must do something about it, but what? Here’s the answer.
Businesses we’re talking to already know their energy bill this year will be double last year’s. For some that’s potentially life or death.
The simple fact of the matter is that in the short-term energy prices are going to continue to rise by probably a further 40% this year. When they eventually stabilise, it will be at a significantly higher level than now and there’s nothing that you can do to avoid that.
Between a rock and a hard place
You could take the hit and swallow the increase, but for most firms that’s not an option. It will have to be passed on as higher output prices and that has a whole bunch of competitive issues of its own, none of them good.
Previously the board managed energy costs by focusing on tariff, but that won’t work in this instance because the tariffs are the problem. At the same time as energy costs are soaring, the long-term Net Zero Carbon agenda hasn’t gone away. You still need a plan to reduce CO2 emissions to zero, switching to a green tariff is likely to inflate costs even further.
Bottom line, to bring these unavoidable price increases to a affordable level you need to find a way to manage consumption down without damaging your client/workplace experience, while at the same time maintaining your environmental credentials with your customers and suppliers.
The solution
Rather than relying on the market to get you out of this hole, you need to tackle waste and overuse. Assuming energy prices go up by 40%, if you could reduce consumption, by say 20%, that would still see you paying more but at a more manageable 12% increase. (see the table below for a simplified example.) This would be a saving that you could bank year after year.
Example
|
Energy consumption annually |
10,000 kwH |
|
|
@20p per kwH = |
£2,000 p.a. |
|
|
40% increase per kwH = 28p |
£2,800 p.a. |
+40% |
|
Reduce consumption by 20% = |
8,000 kwH |
|
|
8,000 kwH @ 28p = |
£2,240 p.a. |
+12% |
Automated Monitoring and Targeting (AM&T) solutions have a proven record spanning 20 years, ours among them, of helping you achieve a sustainable 20% reduction in consumption. However, we’ll be the first to admit, the problem was that as often or not, this cost more in labour to achieve than it saved in the short term.
AM&T systems chunk through huge volumes of data and spit out equally huge volumes of information, to be validated and interpreted. Wading through them meant a significant cost in labour hours, to establish if there was a problem, let alone what the cause was. Consequently, there was normally a considerable time delay between spotting a problem and doing something about it. Not anymore.
Artificial Intelligence to the rescue
We recognised that not everyone has the time or skills to manage the large amounts of information that AM&T creates. That’s why we invented EMMA AI.
As its name suggests EMMA AI is an advanced, AI AM&T platform that takes this same data and automatically turns it into actionable instructions. If you want, it can send instructions directly to a nominated resource to fix an anomaly or abnormality in utility consumption – electricity, gas, solar, oil, whatever.
So, one energy manager can do the work of twenty. As an AI system, EMMA AI learns from each actioned work ticket it produces so that the instructions and recommendations it outputs are increasingly accurate and granular.
There’s no capital expense, EMMA AI operates on a simple licence fee and typically will cost around 1-2% of your energy spend.
