Description
Electricity costs are made up of several different components:
- energy charges (the electrons used at the negotiated retail price)
- network charges – the regulated cost of the poles and wires required to deliver energy
- environmental charges – the cost of renewable energy certificates
- metering charges – the cost of the metering service
- market charges – usage-based charges to pay the market operator
A lot of work is put into sourcing competitive pricing from the retailers for the energy component but that is usually less than 50% of the total cost.
Network charges are 40 – 50% of the total cost and are often thought of as a fixed cost. Network costs are determined by the network tariff that your site is put on and how much and when you are using electricity. It is common for one short period of one particular day of the year to drive up costs for the entire year without you even being aware of it.
Network costs can often be reduced by analysing your electricity usage patterns and understanding the trends, patterns and outliers that are driving the costs along with making sure that you are on the lowest-cost tariff for your operation.
Conducting a network cost analysis can lead to finding significant annual cost savings.
Network Cost Analysis
Objective: To identify sustainable annual network cost savings
Method:
- Analyse electricity usage interval data (half-hour data) for monthly trends, patterns and outliers
- Analyse electricity usage interval for day-of-week patterns and outliers
- Analyse electricity usage interval data for time-of-day trends, patterns and outliers
- Conduct power quality analysis
- Isolate the drivers of electricity network demand costs
- Conduct a comparative analysis of different tariff options for the lowest cost
- Provide report including the full analysis and the recommendations to reduce the costs
- Make the necessary application to the network operator via the retailer to change tariffs, if necessary
Fee: $2,000 + GST per NMI (supply point) capped at 50% of the identified annual savings
Guarantee: At the very least, the fee would be recovered within 6-months (and could be recovered within one month).
