Getting a grip on the facts
July 01st 2008

Knowing the scale and nature of a task is essential to its successful conclusion – unless you are going to rely on blind luck.That is why metering is so important and why the Government needs to be even more ambitious in its plans for smart metering, argues Alan Aldridge, executive director of the Energy Services and Technology Association (ESTA)

The Government’s acknowledgement of the central importance of accurate and timely information in helping people – whether individual consumers or large businesses – make informed decisions about their energy usage was welcomed wholeheartedly by the energy efficiency industry at the publication of the White Paper last year. This, after all, is the central tenet of energy management, first articulated over a century ago by that great Victorian scientist Lord Kelvin: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”!

The meter has been the mainstay of crucial energy management techniques like Monitoring & Targeting (M&T) for many decades but the addition of computer technology at the beginning of this decade has transformed this discipline. automatic Monitoring & Targeting (aM&T), or ‘smart metering’ as it is often called, has relieved the energy manager of the repetitive, tedious aspects of the technique and freed him to maximise the energy saving opportunities. The meters themselves are becoming more powerful and able to collect – and sometimes process – a number of datastreams.

The building regulations

The latest version of the Building Regulations, introduced in 2006, already requires significant use of ‘advanced metering’. Part L2 for non-domestic buildings says:“Reasonable provision for energy meters would be to install energy metering systems that enable: at least 90% of the estimated annual energy consumption of each fuel to be assigned to the various end-use categories (heating, lighting, and so on).” It adds the requirement that “buildings with a total useful floor area greater than 1000m2 [have] automatic meter reading and data collection facilities.” Automatic meter reading (AMR) is especially useful where an organisation is spread over several sites or there are a number of buildings on a single site. It enables the energy manager to keep a closer watch on performance and so identify and correct any unexpected changes quickly.

In addition, the use of “automatic monitoring and targeting with alarms for out of range values”qualifies for a 5% allowance on the building’s emission rate. In other words, the Government accepts that just by installing such systems, savings of this order would be achieved. ESTA members’ experience suggests that when these are fully integrated into energy management programmes the impact can be up to 20% efficiency savings.

Smart metering

So,having recognised the potential, it was natural for the Government to extend the use of smart metering in order to capture these kind of efficiency savings more widely throughout the country. ESTA has been very supportive of the plan to give all but the smallest business customers access to smart metering and also to give domestic consumers some form of real-time display so that they can see just how much energy they are using.To make lasting and substantial cuts in carbon emissions, it is important that energy efficiency becomes a part of life both at home and in the office.

In the event, the Government seems to be scaling back its plans at the moment. The recent response to the consultation on smart metering suggests that domestic real-time display units will not be as widely available as suggested in the White Paper. ESTA supports this as standalone displays can be inaccurate and could damage the credibility of smart metering with the public,More important for the non-domestic sector, the Government has reduced the number of sites to be covered by this initiative. The initial thresholds set out in the consultation were that sites meeting the following criteria would be included:

• Profile Classes 5-8 of the electricity markets, which reflect the highest energy users in the sub-100KWh market that currently require metering to record maximum demand peaks and load factors
• all non-daily metered gas sites consuming > 73,200 kWh per annum.

ESTA and a number of other groups who contributed to the consultation felt this was a sensible line to draw for inclusion in this scheme.However, after the consultation closed and only a few weeks before it published its response, the Government announced that the threshold figures for gas were inaccurate and that the real figure should have been 732,000kWh, a ten-fold increase and one which industry sources believe reduces the number of gas sites covered from 400,000 to 40,000. The 160,000 eligible electricity sites are not affected by the change.

The Government claims that this is the level at which it would be costeffective to install smart metering. ESTA had been broadly supportive of the original cut-off point for mandatory smart metering that provides rapid (Day + 1) access to profile/half-hourly data. However,we believe that due to the falling price of technology and the rising price of energy, businesses with utility bills down to £2500 per annum could now find it cost-effective to use some form of smart metering – that includes just about everyone not on a domestic tariff.

While we are disappointed in the Government’s conclusions, we believe that the application of aM&T systems will become increasingly widespread as prices continue to rise and as carbon trading affects smaller organisations.The latter may not be so far away either: in May the Commons Environmental Audit Committee urged the Government to continue work on ‘personal carbon trading’.

The carbon reduction commitment More immediately, though, larger organisations will be required to take part in the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) which will involve organisations with an “annual electricity consumption from all installed half-hourly [both mandatory and voluntary] meters in excess of 6000MWh”.This will include all businesses with an energy bill of more than about £500,000. Accurate metering systems will be needed to set the baseline for trading and to identify how emissions can be reduced. The funds accumulated from sales of carbon allowances will be recycled to participants through the establishment of a league table of performance. But certain initiatives to improve efficiency will increase the amount of recycled funds received, specifically member of the Energy Efficiency Accreditation Scheme and also the installation of aM&T. So there is a two-fold incentive to act sooner rather than later – the ability to manage emissions trading more accurately and to increase the amount of funds received.

Energy certificates

And we should not forget that from October this year many organisations across the UK will be required to produce Display Energy Certificates (DECs) which have to be put up in public areas of the sites.The requirement applies to all large (more than 1000m2) publicly-funded buildings which have significant public access.

DECs assess the way a building is managed and so energy performance is calculated using a ‘performance rating’. This is a measure of how efficiently a building is run from day to day. Whereas the ‘asset rating’ used in standard Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) requires an audit of the building, the principle behind a performance rating involves determining how much energy has been used over the course of a year and dividing by the useful floor area. Meter readings (for electricity and gas) and fuel purchase bills (for solid and liquid fuels) should be all that is needed. And where automatic Monitoring & Targeting (aM&T) systems are in use, these will be able to work out the results for you:this is just one more benefits of using the technology.

Controlling energy and emissions is a key part of policy which means that more and more people will be affected by Government initiatives in this area. Effective metering – as part of automatic Monitoring & Targeting systems – will help prepare for them.

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