Business parks
In 2021, we were awarded a contract by the Welsh Government and Blaenau Gwent County Borough Council to develop the solution for energy and flexibility trading in Business Parks in the Borough.
Partners included Wales & West Utilities.
We undertook an initial appraisal during March to April 2021, and identified several business parks that would provide us with the archetypes or uses that we can replicate elsewhere in the County Borough.
We selected these parks based on a mix of public and private ownership, different uses and sizes to cover the full range. Where there were existing renewables, we included these in our trading analysis. Our conclusions were to maximise revenues and carbon savings, shared microgrids were important.
Project aims and intentions
01 INNOVATION
Embrace and accelerate the transition to smart energy by developing innovative energy trading solutions which support energy supply, demand and storage.
02 PARTNERSHIPS & COLLABORATION
Develop cross-sector partnerships with the public sector, energy network operators, businesses and householders to optimise the use of energy, and trade surplus stored or renewable energy.
03 SCALEABILITY
Scale from an initial 6 business parks to other places in Wales and to spread benefits of One Wales’ wider goals of wellbeing, alleviating fuel poverty, focusing on economic prosperity and the ambition for the Welsh public sector to be carbon neutral by 2030. Create a world-beating solution that can be used across the UK and internationally on a wide range of business parks.
04 WIDER GOVERNMENTAL AIMS
Support leadership with addressing the climate impact of government’s own operations. Whilst many Councils have declared climate emergencies, only on in five understand how to do this. We supported the County Borough developing a specially modified version of the Pathfinder tool to develop Net Zero strategies.
05 TENANT NET ZERO SUPPORT
Optimise the energy consumption and identified cost-effective decarbonisation pathways for the business parks and hence the County Borough. We were successful in identifying several offshoot projects that are in development including roof-top solar PV on industrial units with shared savings models.
06 OUTCOMES
‘’The BankEnergi BlaZe project opened up and made available expertise that CoTech would never have otherwise received. Reports produced were relevant to our business and not generic. This has been useful in terms of building a sustainability policy and picture that we are keen to promote and definitely see this as the first phase of many’’.
Managing Director, CoTech, Tafarnaubach
