Following a successful trial of their technology with a number of local authority district heating systems, AEC have agreed a funding deal with EDF Energy to roll this out under the Carbon Emissions Reduction Target (CERT) programme.

In the trial savings aggregating well over the 10% target were achieved at a number of sites for Wandsworth and Tower Hamlets.  AEC were recognised for their success in this trial with a number of awards including runner up in the National Energy Efficiency awards.

AEC’s technology focuses on large multi boiler sites and is able to identify the actual demand for energy (heating and hot water services), and compare this to the amount of energy being used. The difference being the opportunity to make savings, this information is then used to respecify the control strategy sitting in the BEMS. Overall energy consumption is then monitored using automatic meter reading technology and savings calculated using degree day normalised data.

Their approach is all based on software changes and is non invasive, it does not require any shut down of the system and they will work with the relevant maintenance engineers to ensure that it is maintained over the long term. Under CERT the savings target is 10%, but it is not unheard of to deliver savings of over 30%.

“We anticipate that we will be able to make some significant reductions in carbon emissions as well as make some strong inroads into helping to address energy poverty at certain sites” said Julian Miller, Director of AEC. “The opportunity for making substantial savings without compromising the delivery of services exists pretty much across the board and we are looking forward to working with EDF Energy where in many cases it can all be fully funded through their CERT initiative”.

AEC’s technology has been successfully applied across a broad spectrum of buildings, including docklands sky scrapers and the Tower of London, they also have a contract to deliver savings across a wide range of MoD bases.