There was an interesting piece on Radio 4 last night, on the PM programme. It was describing an interesting and sensible measure which the Marriott hotel in Kensington had implemented to save electricity. You can imagine that it takes a great deal of energy to keep the customers cool in hot weather we are presently experiencing. In fact PM reported that the hotel was using 70 kw/h while the air conditioning systems were running. The clever idea, which is widely used elsewhere, is to turn off the chiller units which cool the water which is circulating around the hotel, and over which air is blown into each room. Usually the cool water is kept at 4 degrees celsius, but by turning off the chiller for just one hour the water only rises to 6 degrees and the air conditioning is hardly affected.
During this hour the electricity usage for the air conditioning systems at the hotel drops to only 10 kw/h. If this practice was adopted over the whole year then the hotel could expect to save £2,500 at average domestic electricity rates. What a great idea. The hotel saves money and at the same time reduces the pressure it places on the National Grid.
What could there possible be to criticise?
Hold on a minute! How does this useful initiative by the Department for Energy manage to drop the ball at the last moment? Tucked away in the report we discover that the Marriott Hotel is encouraged to save itself £2,500 a year by receiving a subsidy from ordinary electricity users like you and me. Well I suppose there are costs associated with introducing an energy saving plan like this, even if the Hotel stands to save itself £2,500 a year. Perhaps a subsidy of £500 covers the hassle of investigating the idea?
In fact the subsidy each of us is contributing to the Marriott Hotel comes to £20,000 a year. No, not £2,000. It’s £20,000 a year. We are being charged extra to pay the Marriott to engage in an energy saving activity that already produces a cost saving. Energy Secretary Ed Davey appeared on PM last night. He thought it was a great deal for us all. PM helpfully calculates that if the Marriott chain switches off its chilling units in all its hotels it will attact a subsidy of £700,000 a year. That’s £700,000 a year we are all paying for, while it will already save more than £30,000 in electricity costs.
How can Ed Davey think this is a good deal? He tries to suggest that it is cheaper to pay businesses to use less electricity rather than build new power stations. But its impossible to see how ordinary electricity bill payers, those of us who are funding these subsidies, are benfitting from this scheme. Why are we not being given a subsidy not to use electricity in our own homes? And are we sure that a business cannot simply set up a more or less empty building and not bother turning on any electrical devices and then claim large subsidies for not using electricity that there was no intention of using?
I shall be putting in a FOI enquiry to ask how much money is being given away to businesses in this scheme. It is just being given away. If a company can save money by using electricity more intelligently it will do so. It doesn’t need a subsidy of more than 10 times the electricity it will already save itself. If we read about this elsewhere in the EU we would call it a scam.
Whatever it is, it’s a rip off for ordinary people struggling to pay their electricity bills. But the Marriott Hotel in Kensington doesn’t need to worry about that any more, we are paying the bill for them.
It is the sacred cow of ‘business’.
It ‘provides jobs’ so it will automatially be treated better than the poor folk.
Do they ‘provide jobs’?
‘Let them eat royal baby cake,’ as the Powers That Be will say this weekend.
Is this why it is freezing in the Cafe in the mornings when it is not so warm,and the air conditioning is on when not needed, and besides I thought we all wanted hot weather,what on earth is wrong with a bit of sweat for a change,it sells more drinks,may I remind you of an old movie called” the smallest show on Earth” a little Cinema where they put the heating on full blast,and sold tons of ice cream.
I would expect the 70 kw/h in the article should be 70 kW, as a kW is a measure of the energy consumed (or generated) per second.
(1 kW is 1000 Joules per second, where a Joule is the work done when one kilogram is accelerated at 1 metre per second per second through a distance of one metre.)
This is presumably an example happening already of the recently aired proposal to pay businesses compensation for not using electricty. And who will pay this compensation? We will in the form of higher bills.
How about paying us compensation for not using electricity?
This is just one aspect of the complete shambles of an energy policy we’ve been lumbered with – and for which we’ll pay. Booker in Saturday’s DT and Richard North of EU Referendum have been tireless in exposing this stuff – essential reading if your blood pressure can stand it.
while agreeing that business needs to look at their energy costs, as consumers we can do a great deal to get our bills down
http://chop-cloc.com/#section2
this turns off your boiler for 15 minutes every hour. in that 15 minutes the building wont cool that much, and the cost of getting it back up to temperature is less than the cost of running the heating for the 15 minutes.
Alexsandr, I agree entirely with the scheme you direct us to consider. But my anger is caused by the fact that we will not be receiving £1000 a year to turn our boilers off for 15 minutes an hour, nor should we. And nor should we be paying for businesses to do so.
Peter from Maidstone@July 20th, 2013 – 10:34
yes. agree 100%
I find I’m paying 20% tax on an electricity bill while the company profit is 2% of the bill.