A very constructive meeting between BEIS officials, Trade bodies and manufacturing companies to discuss two schemes to reduce UK’s Carbon Footprint.

It was an interesting meeting which discussed how to improve the efficiency of high energy use businesses but also begin to tackle the “long tail” of low energy use small businesses. Thes businesses may only have energy costs of 2-3% of total costs but the sheer volume of them has a massive effect on UL energy usage.

Designing the Industrial Energy Transformation Fund

The £315 million Industrial Energy Transformation Fund will support businesses with high energy use to:

• cut their bills and emissions through increased energy efficiency
• transition to a low carbon future through the use of lower carbon energy and processes

This informal consultation seeks views and supporting evidence to help us design the fund. Its focus is particularly on the benefits and barriers to industrial decarbonisation as government has a good understanding of these issues for energy efficiency.

Details can be found here

Energy efficiency scheme for small and medium sized businesses

This call for evidence seeks views on various proposals for a new Business Energy Efficiency Scheme focused on SMEs.

We are keen to hear from anyone with an interest in how a new scheme for SMEs could be designed, including:

• energy companies
• network operators
• SMEs
• financial institutions
• Energy Service Companies (ESCOs)
• academics

SMEs account for 99% of UK business and have a very low awareness of the benefits of energy efficiency. The additional documents here provide summaries of findings from 2 projects which explored how to engage SMEs in energy efficiency:

• Digital Discovery: funded by BEIS and delivered through external contractors (completed November 2017) considers the demand for a website targeting SMEs with information about energy efficiency
• Digital Alpha: a 12-week project (completed July 2018) to build 3 prototypes with the aim of motivating SMEs to make a significant contribution to the 20% ambition

We have issued the government response to our previous call for evidence, Helping businesses to improve the way they use energy, in parallel with this call for evidence.

The link can be found here