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For consumers with bills of £50k plus per year advanced metering technology has existed at a cost which provides a good return on investment through better energy management for some time. However, the majority of commercial consumers have smaller energy bills, with most of the SME sector typically falling under £50k. This sector is of particular interest to the Carbon Trust as substantial energy savings leading to cost and CO2 emission reductions can be achieved. The experiences of large energy customers suggest that advanced metering technology could help unlock savings in SMEs too, but historically the cost has been prohibitive. Recent developments in areas such as communications technology have helped make advanced metering a more realistic proposition for roll out across a large number of discrete sites such as those found in the SME community. The advanced metering technology accelerator was a two year field trial to explore the benefits of advanced metering in the SME community.
The project published its findings on May 15 with a report launch event at the Institute of Directors.
This 2 year field trial has studied the performance of advanced metering in SMEs and found that these companies can make average carbon savings of over 5% per year. Cost benefit analysis has shown that payback on metering investment is very attractive (less than 1 year) for multi-site companies (e,g, high street retail chains) and those SMEs with higher consumption (e.g. manufacturing sector). Analysis on a UK level shows that annual savings of 2.5 MtCO2 can be made at no net cost to the UK. The Carbon Trust report calls for government action to accelerate the uptake of this technology amongst UK SMEs, and proposes cost effective measures to unlock the identified carbon savings through the roll out of advanced metering
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