If you are working for an SME in the UK, I have some good news for you! The Carbon Trust is providing small and medium businesses up to £10,000 to install energy saving technology, including renewables, new energy-saving equipment and behind the meter batteries.
The funding mechanism is called The Green Business Fund, which will offer direct financial support through energy assessments, workshops, procurement support and up to £10k capital (or up to 30% of the purchase cost) per SME towards purchasing equipment to save energy.
Is your SME eligible?
The fund is available to SMEs installing renewable technologies or replacing equipment they currently own with energy efficient alternatives where the savings can be clearly defined in the first five years.
When it comes to clearly defining those savings and forecasting them for an extended period of time, things can get a little tricky – that’s why it’s a good idea to work with an energy management platform that can automatically track and verify those savings for you, in a way that’s easy to understand and communicate.
If you have the automatic monitoring and targeting (aM&T) thing down pat, you can apply for a capital contribution here – keep in mind that you must be under 250 employees and based in England, Wales or Scotland.
Don’t meet these criteria, but still want to learn about how to obtain and apply energy funding to SMEs in general? Check here. If you have no idea what aM&T means, better start here.
BEIS offering £28 million in energy funding for SMEs
Earlier this year, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) asked for expressions of interest in £289 million of energy funding for SMEs to develop demand side response, flexibility and storage technologies, and to speed up their delivery.
The government has made £7.6 million available for “innovative demonstrations of energy demand side response technologies in UK businesses or public sector organisations to reduce their energy use in peak times and provide flexibility to the energy system” according to a report by New Power. Interested parties have until May 11th to submit a registration email to smart.innovation@beis.gov.uk with “Non-Domestic DSR Competition” as the subject.
A separate competition for £9 million has been announced to reduce the cost of energy storage. The deadline for the first tranche of funding passed in March, but you can still register and apply for Tranche 2 by June 1st and June 8th, respectively.
Finally, over the next four years, the British government also plans to invest up to £9.2 million in an Industrial Energy Efficiency Accelerator. It will seek scalable, industry-specific solutions by leveraging private sector investment and strengthening supply chains in the UK. Expressions of interest should be sent to industry.innovation@beis.gov.uk.
Whether you are an SME working inside or outside the UK, and want to get more information on how to build energy productivity into your business (and where to get the funding to do it) – check out the free eBook we created just for you:
