Commercial Blog

In times like these, it’s vital for many businesses to find ways to save money. It’s even better if saving money also saves energy and reduces the business’s carbon footprint. So we’re delighted to present a service that allows you to invest in long term savings, with no initial capital outlay...

By partnering with ECI Energy, Ireland’s leading lighting company, we can now offer LED lighting upgrades at no upfront cost. Instead, the service is repaid through a proportion of your bill savings over 5 years.

UK farms produce about 10% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions (due to cows, fertilisers, heavy machinery... and the fact that 71% of the UK is farmland) and pressure is mounting to address this, if we’re to meet our climate change mitigation ambitions.

When we browse websites or store information in the cloud, we’re not just outsourcing computing power, we’re outsourcing the emissions needed to run the internet. Data centres pick up the slack. They consume more than 2% of electricity worldwide and collectively have the same emissions as the airline industry. With global data traffic doubling every four years, this is likely to increase - adding even more to the strain on the climate.

While climate science is alarming (suggesting just 10 years left to limit warming below the dangerous 1.5 degree level), it presents an opportunity for businesses to step up where governments have made little progress. Sustainability can give your company an edge and set you apart as a leader in your industry.

You may see it as a moral urge to reduce your business carbon footprint. Or perhaps it’s the long term financial savings that appeal. Either way, it makes sense to be a step ahead of future regulations which are likely to penalise polluters.

According to a Nielsen survey, 81% of customers think it is ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ important that companies act to improve the environment - so there’s a great commercial imperative to engage in climate action too.

But where do you start? We’ve broken down the question of how to reduce your company’s carbon footprint into five key topics to help you create an actionable plan.

We’ve recently done some modelling of the performance of solar tracking systems, but this can only tell you so much. What about how one would perform in the real world? Luckily we can answer that by looking at a solar tracker that we installed a few years ago...

Is it possible to get free solar panels for businesses? A lot has changed since solar first started gaining popularity, with prices falling around 50% in the last decade and many of the initial subsidies like the Feed-in Tariff closed to new applicants. But there are still opportunities for companies to benefit from financed solar systems, the most promising of which are Solar PPAs.

We hear more and more about Blockchain technology.  The technology creates a transparent public ledger that records series of transactions, facilitating a fast, low-cost, trusted transfer of value without the involvement of traditional intermediaries.  

Already used in the financial sector, it’s only a matter of time before Blockchain hits the energy sector in a major way, particularly with the explosion of micro-generation of electricity, the ending of solar subsidies, and the advent of smart meters.

With Octopus Energy claiming to have paid customers to use excess electricity at night on four occasions in the last 12 months, real time peer-to-peer trading of electricity is surely just around the corner. Other potential applications include authentication of renewable generation and trading of emissions permits.

On 9^th July, the government launched its “Road to Zero Strategy” to lead the world in zero emission vehicle technology.

Not to be confused with any other ‘Road to Zero’ or ‘Round in Circle’ government strategies, this one is all about ensuring at least 50% of cars are ultra-low emission by 2030, and ensuring that the infrastructure is in place to support this.

If you’re in charge of a ‘workplace’, the good news is that on the back of Road to Zero, the Workplace Charging Scheme will now contribute 75% of purchase and installation costs (up to a maximum of £500) towards the cost of each charging socket installed. 

The grant is available for to 20 chargepoints per applicant, across all sites.

In other words, up to £10,000 per business.

Are you responsible for a commercial property or a commercial / residential property portfolio? Or are you an architect, specifier, commercial end user, engineer, contractor or consultant seeking to learn more about solar PV or battery storage?

If so you many be interested in our FREE CPD accredited training courses.

Upgrading to LED lighting typically halves your lighting bill.

If you install lighting controls at the same time (occupancy sensors etc), you can reduce running costs by around 70%, particularly if half your office is empty, but all your lights are on.

Spirit Energy has this week launched an online LED Lighting Calculator to enable you to see very quickly how much energy, and money, you could save, and how long it would take a lighting upgrade to pay for itself.