Severn Trent, one of three companies that had their business plans fast-tracked by Ofwat, is inviting companies to come forward with fresh ideas that will help reduce its future energy costs.
Last month, it joined with United Utilities in investing in the World Water Innovation Fund, which supports development of technologies that help protect scarce water resources.
The utility company, which serves eight million people across the midlands and Wales, currently uses 900GWh of electricity every year. This equals a cost of around £100 million, their second greatest expense after people.
Severn Trent is currently on track to be 50 per cent self sufficient from its own renewable energy by 2020, from sources such as anaerobic digestion, solar, crop digestion, hydro, wind, and food waste.
It hopes that the implementation of new flexible energy schemes will make it even more energy efficient, and in turn drive down costs for customers.
David Gibbin, energy demand optimisation advisor at Seven Trent, said: “Energy is one of the biggest costs to our business; we serve a huge geographical area and need to pump large amounts of water and waste to and from our customers. In fact, the energy we use equates to the annual usage of about 250,000 households.
“We’ve invested large amounts in developing renewable energy technology, with a target to generate half of what we use by 2020, and we’re also working hard to reduce our energy usage as much as possible – but we know there’s more to be done.
“That’s why we’re inviting companies to come forward with new innovative solutions that we can take advantage of to make us even more efficient.
“Any savings we can make on our energy bills will reduce our operating costs, which is great news for our customers as it will help us to keep bills low.”
It has asked companies coming forward with ways to help its energy usage to focus on these areas:
- Opportunities to use hydrogen and bio-methane, including vehicles and power generation
- Alternatives to traditional diesel standby power resilience
- Energy flexibility and control solutions
- Innovative use of waste heat
- Low-head in-pipe hydro generation
- Solutions for storage and balancing of surplus on-site generation
At the start of March, Eon launched a campaign aimed at helping businesses more efficiently manage their energy usage.