Onzo

Onzo welcomes the report from the Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil & Energy Security. It reinforces evidence that consumers have little to look forward to: domestic energy prices rising and spiking to levels that will bring yet more people into energy poverty, and interruptions in supply more commonly known as black-outs.

The report focuses predominantly on the central and local generation issues that this raises. However, there are opportunities to address the challenges also through efficient distribution (the smart grid), and reductions in usage by customers particularly at the peak.

Some of the reductions in usage can be achieved by improvements to the built infrastructure: better insulation and more efficient heating. But these still require financial support to overcome the barriers of high capital costs and a long pay-back period. Onzo has previously argued that councils could fund improvements (having raised money through bonds) and charge consumers through their council tax bill so that the cost/benefit stays with the property and not its owner.

Some of the reductions can be achieved by Demand Response which the report mentions. A new innovation from the US offers a potential solution to both demand response and improvements in built infrastructure: Recurve specializes in residential retrofits and software for conducting retrofits, and is proposing that retrofits will be paid for from forward markets – forward capacity, also known as permanent load shifting (PLS), is a more static and predictable version of demand response (with the added attraction that there are no curtailment events in which heaters/air conditioning are turned off at inconvenient times.

One conclusion that Onzo draws from the report is that utility companies will need to offer a wider range of energy products and services to their customers and have much more sophisticated interactions with them. It is a joke within the industry that utilities have two types of customer: business and domestic. The future will require a much more detailed segmentation and understanding of the customer base, more channels to that customer base, and a way of handling the volumes of data that are required to make this work.

The bleak prospects can be avoided. But only by concerted action by all parties starting now.