Find it · Prove it · Fix it
A food manufacturer operating three sites approached us after receiving conflicting advice from their energy broker and solar installer. We reviewed their utility contracts, billing history and installed solar performance from scratch, independently, without any supplier relationship to protect.
Identified across utility overcharges, reactive power penalties and lost solar export — none of which had been flagged by the incumbent broker.
The review covered three areas.
Utility charges: Billing across all three sites contained legacy capacity charges that hadn’t been updated since a site expansion two years prior. The agreed supply capacity was significantly above actual demand, resulting in avoidable standing charges on every bill.
Reactive power: Two of the three sites were incurring reactive power penalties — a charge that appears as a line item on half-hourly metered supplies when power factor falls below the network threshold. Neither the client nor their broker had identified it.
Legacy solar: A 98kWp rooftop solar array installed in 2021 was generating materially below its modelled output. Monitoring data showed consistent underperformance against irradiance benchmarks. Investigation identified a faulty string inverter that had been operating in a degraded state for at least fourteen months, with no alert having been raised by the installer’s monitoring system.
Comprising £31,400 in corrected utility charges, £14,600 in reactive power remediation, and £12,200 in recovered solar generation value.
Restoring the solar array to full output and eliminating avoidable demand also reduced the carbon footprint of the sitesu2019 operations.
Additional solar generation recovered annually
Reduction in net carbon emissions per year
Reviewed under a single commercial engagement
"We’d had the same broker for four years and assumed everything was in order. The Gateforth One review found charges we didn’t know existed and a solar problem nobody had told us about. The report gave us everything we needed to act immediately."
Book a commercial review and we'll show you where the leakage is across your sites — before you commit capital.