UK renewables firm Dulas has partnered with Italy’s Innovatec to launch a new energy management service aimed specifically at businesses with intensive energy demands.
The Dulas-Innovatev joint venture, to be known as the Intelligent Energy Management Service, will include creating an existing energy consumption profile, investigating how this can be adjusted and then adopting efficiency and on-site renewables generation technologies.
The two firms said that through this service businesses could reduce their demand side profile, save on energy costs and ultimately reduce their exposure to peak time pricing.
Dulas added that while renewables had historically been viewed as an additional revenue stream due to past feed-in tariff rates, changing market conditions – coupled with the removal of support mechanisms across Europe – had meant that industrial users “need to reconsider how they consume electricity”.
As a result, the new service has been designed to enable intensive users to predict long-term power use and help off-set the risk of future energy price increases.
Dulas also said the service had the potential to offer “compound efficiencies”, instead of systems focused solely on renewable generators which “may not provide the cost savings hoped for”.
Alistair Marsden, sales director at Dulas, said: “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.”