The Football Association is one of 24 organisations that will be paid to permanently reduce electricity demand by the UK government.
The Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) has published the results of its second Demand Reduction Pilot auction, which took place last week.
Under the trial programme, organisations receive money for implementing energy efficiency projects if they deliver electricity savings at peak times. It is part of the government’s strategy to increase energy efficiency. The less power the UK uses, the fewer new power stations will be required. The projects are timely because next winter’s margin of capacity over supply will likely be somewhere between 0% and 4%.
Although up to £6 million was available, Decc awarded £4.74m via reverse auction for a total of 37 projects. The winning bidders must deliver peak capacity savings totalling at least 23.3MW from November to February during either 2016-17 or 2017-18.
All but three of the projects awarded the funding are lighting projects. That chimes with theenergyst.com’s latest survey of directors. Almost 80% said they planned to make energy efficiency investments in lighting over the next 12 months, followed by implementing behavioural change initiatives (53%), building controls (53%) and onsite generation (42%).
That’s probably because lighting projects usually deliver payback times of under two years, sometimes within one year if lifecycle cost analysis is used to calculate returns (i.e. factoring in elements like maintenance regimes to the equation).
Two projects, both by Welsh Water, will use centrifugal fans while the University of Westminster will use variable speed drives to cut energy demand.
As well as the FA, organisations awarded funds include Dixons, Sainsbury’s, Sony and the British Heart Foundation.
See the full list of winners here.
Read more about this year’s key energy procurement and management issues in our new free 2016 Directors’ Energy report. Download it here.
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