ESME Energy

A great question posed by the BBC and one we think ESME goes a long way to making simpler for many households. With a payback in less than five years, lower capital requirements, flexibility to take with you if you move, and 60% savings on your electricity costs. That's why we called ourselves ESME - Energy Savings Made Easy.

The BBC posed the question - “An energy efficient home - why is it so difficult?” The BBC article underscores homeowners' challenges when striving to enhance their homes' energy efficiency. At ESME.energy, we specialise in providing home battery storage solutions designed to address these issues. Our systems enable homeowners to store low-cost electricity during off-peak hours and utilize it when energy demand and prices are higher. This approach reduces energy bills and decreases carbon emissions by optimising energy consumption patterns. For a comprehensive overview of the benefits our solutions offer, we invite you to visit our website at esme.energy. There, you'll find detailed information on how our Home Battery Storage Solutions can make energy efficiency more accessible and manageable for homeowners across the UK. https://lnkd.in/eknMG6WE

Price Rises Announced - but not for ESME customers! Ofgem (the energy regulator) has announced the energy price cap will rise around 10% for a typical home from October 1 to December 31, due to the global cost of gas. Gas is still used to generate most of our electricity during peak use. So the upshot of this is that Electricity prices will go up in October. Taking Intelligent Octopus Go, the peak prices are rising from 24.4p per kWh to 26.6p per kWH. But here's the good news - whilst the peak prices are going up, the off-peak price remains the same at 7p. This means all our customers are protected from this price rise. Charging your batteries between 11:30 pm and 5:30 means you don't use any peak priced electricity. And even better the return on your investment has just become even quicker. If you would like to join our customers and take advantage of these huge energy savings and help use more of our renewable energy then use our website calculator to see how much you could save. https://www.esme.energy/

It is great to see the early results and demonstrable savings Wayne Mitchell Even better now we have Octopus Energy savings integrated. Very happy to add the additional battery module, if it proves beneficial. Thank you for your custom and support.

Desperate to use free electricity? This week, Octopus offered customers free electricity for an hour during the day on certain tariffs. What’s not to like about having something for free? The problem of course is that to make that work, you need to be able to take advantage of it, which ideally means turning on the washing machine, or dishwasher, plugging in the electric car and generally trying to use as much electricity as you can. Of course, if you are all out at work, or don’t set an alarm its very easy to just miss out. Or you might not want to run around turning everything on, in fact, a dishwasher cycle and washing machine often take much longer than an hour so maybe not so helpful. Wouldn’t it be simpler if you could store that free electricity to use as and when it suits you? Well of course with ESME home energy storage, you can do just that. Our latest app does all the hard work for you, so if there is a free event like the one this week, we stop using the batteries and start charging them, storing the free electricity to use anytime you need. If you want to start making huge savings on your electricity, try our cost-saving calculator: https://www.esme.energy/ and see for yourself how much you could be saving. ESME - Energy Savings Made Easy.

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Energy Price Cap falls - but for how long? So we now enter the next price cap from Ofgem the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets. Ofgem are responsible for working with government, industry and consumer groups to deliver a net-zero economy, at the lowest cost to consumers. So the latest price cap has brought energy costs down by an average of £122 or 7% which is always good news for consumers. Problem is a report by the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) said that consumers should brace for an additional hit of up to £600 over the coming winter, largely due to higher wholesale prices. It pointed to a possible £200 price cap rise from October on the back of some analyst calculations, suggesting it was plausible the total could remain around that level until June. One calculation, by experts at Cornwall Insight released last Friday, predicted a 10% - or £155 - increase from 1 October to £1,723 a year but said there remained uncertainty on the market path ahead. So what can you do to protect yourself against this price rises. Well you could start to generate your own energy, get completely off grid. The issue here is the investment needed and if you think you can do it with Solar Panels alone, think again. They may well cover all your needs in summer on a good sunny day, but wait until you see the drop off in energy produced in winter. Yes they can still produce energy on a gloomy day, but it’s not close to their potential on a sunny day. So you are going to need a lot more panels than you may anticipate. Of course you then have to make a enough during the day to cover you in the evening, its easy to forget at this time of year when we are enjoying the late bright evenings that in winter we are int he dark at 5pm and making nothing from our solar panels. Store the energy in batteries, I hear you cry! Well of course, issue now is the investment is going up and the return is taking ever longer. Which is why at ESME we promote a battery first solution. Install enough batteries to cover all your peak costs. Charge only in off peak, currently only 7p per kW on Octopus Intelligent. Help the UK use all the renewable energy produced and reduce your own costs by not 7% but closer to 60%. Which makes a return in under five years. And no difficult install on your roof. If you have a washing machine size space in your utility room or garage, then you’re ready to go. Try the ESME energy saving calculator on our website and start your saving journey now. 

Are Solar Panels Worth it? Everywhere you look now you see a roof with Solar panels mounted. In fact there are now 1.5million solar panels on homes across the UK. Which may lead you to the conclusion that solar panels must be a good idea and you should be investing in them yourself. Certainly solar panels are improving constantly and the price continues to drop, they will save you money on your energy bills. You can even sell energy you make and don't use back to the grid however, the biggest gain comes from using what you generate, where you could save up to £410 a year on your bills. You can expect to pay around £7,000 for a typical 3.5 kilowatt-peak PV solar panel system. Based on the Energy Savings Trust figures, it could take you anywhere between 12 and 17 years to recoup the cost. So you need to be in for the long term, since you shouldn’t expect a big upfront investment to be immediately reflected by a jump in your home’s value. If you’re likely to move in the next 10 years it probably won’t be a financially sound investment. You could choose to have them moved to your new home, but this will not be cheap either. Then you need to think about the energy you can sell. You will most likely be paying roughly 25p per kilowatt for electricity on a standard tariff under the April Price Cap, you will get a lot less than this for the energy you don’t use and sell back to the grid. If you want to do the maths for yourself try the Energy Saving Trust’s panel calculator. And if you want to go ahead, remember you also need to consider your home’s suitability for installation. All of this said solar panels will last a long time, possibly up to 40 years,  but their efficiency will decline after 20+ years. On the other hand if all of this makes you think that perhaps Solar isn’t for you, what alternatives are there. Well at ESME, we advocate a battery first system. Using the latest and best Lithium batteries you can store abundant cheap rate renewable energy yourself and then use it during peak hours to run your home. Our believe that renewables are at their best at scale, large wind farms, solar farms and hydro electric production. Whilst storage is best distributed to the users. This has the advantage of removing strain on the grid network at peak times and ensuring the UK's abundance of renewable generated energy is never lost when we make too much.  Batteries just need some space in your garage or home, they are not much larger than a washing machine and will keep working efficiently for 10+ years. The average payback on the investment is between 4 and 5 years. And you can easily take them with you if you move. If you are interested in saving up to 60% on your monthly electricity costs, then use our energy saving calculator and see how much storage you will need and the savings you could be making. And don’t forget that it is everyday, not just when the sun is shining.

Don’t take our word for it - have a look at the energy bill. At ESME we know storing energy in batteries can be cost saving. Storing the cheap night time electricity and then using it during the day when buying it could cost as much as 3x more. Couple of things here first, daytime and night time are really not as useful as saying peak and off-peak. Since Peak is actually usually until about 11:30pm, for most of us, thats pretty much your whole day. It’s also long after any solar you have has stopped producing any real benefit, so you are forced back into using the grid. But those with solar panels will say, “I sold my excess back to the grid today, so I’m quids in”. Well a quick look at your sale price versus the purchase price will show you who benefits most from that relationship and to be far why would the grid want to buy your electricity when everyone is making it and there’s likely too much to use in any event. Of course as soon as the sun goes down, you have no choice but to buy it back, and most likely at a far higher rate. So storing abundant cheap electricity has to be the answer, and that goes for whoever makes it. Yes if you have solar and make too much, store it for yourself with batteries, stop buying it back later at a greater cost. Chances are you dont need many batteries to save a great deal of money. If you don’t make your own electricity by having solar or even your own wind turbine, then but the cheap off peak, green renewable energy and store that to use in the peak. Either way you will be part of the green solution and save money. Take a look at my energy bill from a day last month. I am now with Octopus, on the Intelligent Octopus Go. Priced at: 7.50p per kWh between 23:30 - 05:30 (Off Peak) 27.94p per kWh between 05:30 - 23:30 (Peak) (Thats 3.7x more expensive during peak) In the image below you can clearly see all my energy use is outside of the peak use, the straight line that goes up along and back down is the price indicator. The bars show when I am buying my electric, all of it is outside of Peak times. The savings speak for themselves. If you would like to see how much you could be saving, use the simple calculator on the home page of the website. We would love to help you save money and reduce your carbon footprint at the same time.

Yes I missed the Northern Lights, so I aimed for our North Star! Ok so like so many of us last week, I woke up to see all my socials full of amazing Northern Lights photos and couldn't believe I missed them. But the Northern lights reminded me we needed to set our North Star for ESME and started me thinking about the concept of guidance and direction, not just in a personal sense, but in our professional and collective journey as well. I know that in the world of business we need a guiding light. So we have started to define our North Star, and I am keen to hear feedback and thoughts from others who have done this for their business and how it has aligned thinking, engaged teams and created a sense of purpose for your business. Our North Star needs to encapsulate much of our thinking; to encourage everyone to reduce their carbon footprint, to make better use of renewable energy by storing it efficiently, to remove the peak energy requirements that have to be met with dirty gas fired power stations, to make the solution affordable and in reach of all home owners to engage with everyone and share the benefits We want a clear, guiding principle that directs our efforts and aligns our actions with the much larger purpose. When I think about the widespread adoption of recycling, it started with a few committed individuals and organisations, but as the importance of sustainability became clearer, more people and companies joined in. Today, recycling is a common practice that contributes significantly to environmental conservation. At ESME I would like to think storing cheap, green, energy could be as commonplace. So whilst I now think about how I could travel, sustainably of course, to see the Northern Lights, I will work on our North Star and see where this journey is going to take us.