Renewable energy installer Dulas has partnered with Italian energy efficiency firm Innovatec to launch an energy management service targeted at intensive energy users in the UK.
The Intelligent Energy Management service has been launched today to enable businesses with intensive energy demands to monitor and understand their consumption profile before looking to create a new one.
After the new consumption profile is in place, on-site renewable generators such as solar and wind can be considered and deployed.
Dulas said that the integrated service has been designed to offer an adaptive approach to predict long-term power use and de-risk future energy costs, and to also create “compound efficiencies” within businesses instead of “embarking solely on off-grid generation schemes that may not provide the cost savings hoped for”.
Alistair Marsden, sales director at Dulas, said the company had launched the service after identifying that efficiency products for high energy users still had room for optimisation.
“High energy users really need to start at the beginning by understanding and controlling energy usage, before installing a large scale rooftop solar project or wind turbine. If on-site clean energy supplies are deployed, and then overall power consumption is reduced, ultimately the renewable energy investment loses its value.
“Once on-site power consumption is fully understood, then it’s appropriate to start looking at adjustments and incremental improvements in energy efficiency. On-site generation is really the final piece of the puzzle, once that initial analysis has been undertaken.
“As much of Europe moves into a post-subsidy landscape, we have to look at new ways of delivering renewable energy projects that provide value for their end users,” Marsden said.
Dulas said that Innovatec’s role in the service would be to provide experience from its own business activities in a post-subsidy renewable energy market after Italy went through much of the same upheaval when its government enacted retroactive cuts to its feed-in tariff in 2012 and again in 2014.
Pietro Colucci, chairman at Innovatec, said that the firm had a “long history” of working with clients to become more energy efficient.
“Observing a similar scenario emerging in the UK, we wanted to find the best partner we could to co-deliver energy efficiency and on site generation. Looking at Dulas’ 30 year heritage in the space, it was clear the business would be ideally placed to collaborate with us on delivering a more holistic approach to helping high energy users reduce their costs,” he added.
In the wake of cuts to the renewables feed-in tariff many solar installers have been diversifying into energy efficiency and management, and one of the takeaways from this year’s Solar Power Portal Roadshows was that understanding energy consumption profiles to maximise self-consumption rates was key to delivering double-digit returns.