Businesses in the cold chain sector, like most large energy consumers, are concerned about rising electricity prices – and with good reason.
The cost of implementing the government’s Clean Power 2030 plan is going to hit consumers hard, as the non-commodity charges added to electricity invoices to fund green power subsidies and infrastructure expansion ramp up.
“Indeed, by 2030, these non-commodity elements are forecast to cost the same as today’s total (commodity + non-commodity) electricity price,” explains Stephen Evans, who heads up the Industry Charges Team at npower Business Solutions.
The exact charges you’ll see on your invoices will depend on a range of variables including your site location, grid connection voltage and capacity.
“For example, a low-voltage site in the north west won’t be as expensive as a high-voltage site in southern England,” says Stephen. “But as most sites for businesses operating in the cold chain are likely to be high voltage or even extra high voltage, the cost increases will be at the larger end. And no matter where your location, the trend for all is clear – significantly higher prices are coming.”
To help you understand the specific cost impact to your business, the npower Business Solutions team have created a unique Energy Cost Calculator that provides a breakdown of all the electricity network, system and policy costs that you could be facing in each of the next five years.
These include the charges consumers pay to fund the electricity transmission and distribution networks, balancing the grid, and subsidies for low-carbon generators such as the Renewables Obligation, Contracts for Difference and the new nuclear Regulated Asset Base (RAB) levy.
“We’ve incorporated many thousands of data items relating to each of these 17 non-commodity charges – drawing on government and industry sources, alongside our own team’s forecasts and insight – and built a tool that then calculates the likely cost added to each megawatt hour of power consumed,” explains Stephen.
“This is then segmented according to each user’s Distribution Network Operator (DNO) region, voltage and kVa capacity.”
You can access your personalised forecast by visiting the Energy Cost Calculator. It only takes a few seconds and requires you to input some basic site data upfront to facilitate the calculation.
For more insight into non-commodity costs – and how further forthcoming changes are likely to impact you – follow Stephen Evans and the wider nBS team of experts via our LinkedIn profile.
