A step closer to saving UK business £4bn

If you’re a regular reader of my blogs, you’ll know that we adopt what’s often considered a strange business model here at npower Business Solutions.

You see, we do our best to help our customers use less of our core products – ie electricity and gas. In fact, it’s our aim to support every one of the businesses we supply to reduce their consumption by 20% or more. And last week, we took a big step closer to achieving this aim…

A new acquisition

If you read the business press, you may have seen that our parent company RWE purchased a specialist energy management company called RUMM.

This Welsh-based firm, which was spun out of the University of South Wales, uses the latest innovations in cloud-based data analytics to help businesses monitor and control their energy in real time.

Since its inception in 2005, RUMM – which stands for Remote Utility Monitoring & Management – has already saved more than £43 million for its customers. We are now planning to roll out RUMM’s software to our biggest Business Solutions customers in Q2 2015, with the goal of reducing their energy spend too.

So where does the £4bn quoted in the blog title come from?

20% savings achievable

Well, the UK’s industrial and commercial sectors currently spend £20 billion a year on electricity and gas. In our Twenty Per Cent Imperative report last year, we showed how increasing energy efficiency by 20% is a realistic goal that could represent a collective saving of around £4bn annually to British business.

This is a mission RUMM’s founders are also committed to. Dr Stephen Lloyd, Chairman and co-founder of RUMM, told me: “npower Business Solutions wants to provide the best possible energy management for its customers and RUMM has the capability to help deliver this. We spoke to a number of energy suppliers, but the way the team at npower want to bring innovation to their customers proved decisive.”

Pinpointing specific areas of waste

RUMM’s proprietary software captures and stores energy usage data every half-hour to identify potential inefficiencies at customer sites. What makes it truly unique, however, is its ability to pinpoint specifics.

For example, it can tell you if you’ve left a warehouse door open and the heat is escaping, or if your air conditioning is set too high. It can even offer automatic switch-off measures.

It’s this kind of intelligence that helps to facilitate behavioural change – and this is what sets RUMM’s software apart from the competition and why we are so excited to be offering it to our larger customers.

So watch this space. I will bring you more news as we make progress. For now, though, if you want to see how we are already helping business make significant savings, check out our current suite of energy management tools.

 

Wayne Mitchell is industrial & commercial markets director at npower.

This is a sponsored article.