In Conversation With Bradley Bevan, Founder of The National Energy Hub
Can you briefly share the founding story of The National Energy Hub and your core mission in the hotel and hospitality space?
My background has been in energy for the last 10 to 15 years or so. My original partner and myself had an idea that we wanted to make a strategic energy procurement for the hospitality sector more transparent using market intelligence and to allow hotels to essentially buy energy a lot more sustainably. With hotels being 24/7 operations,, more so hotels than anything else, they need to understand that their energy patterns are consistent. So, buying energy at the right time is crucial to the success of their business and essentially increasing their bottom line as well. So, for us, it’s providing that intelligence for them to make informed decisions.
What are the biggest challenges you see hotels facing today in terms of energy sustainability?
It’s got to be rising energy costs. If we look at the facts of energy inflation over the last 20 years or so, even from 1989, energy inflation has increased 9 to 10% per year since then. So if we apply that moving forward, energy prices are unsustainable. So I think for us it’s ensuring that one hotels and the hospitality sector are buying more intelligently and sustainably, especially with their grid energy costs but I think when it comes to energy resilience and energy independence is kind of educating them on how they can unlock those factors and those benefits whether it’s just cost and carbon savings or whether it’s actually generating a a whole new revenue stream by utilising solar PV and battery storage heat pumps and EV charge points to generate electricity, store it, and then sell it back to the grid. It’s a whole you whole new revenue stream that they can tap into that most hotels are completely unaware of at the moment. And most hotels with large land space can utilise that quite quickly.
For hotel owners or managers looking to begin their sustainability journey, what’s the first step you recommend?
I would say a full feasibility survey. So a complete walk around of the hotel, how their hotel operates, how the grounds operate, any ground space, anything that’s existing in their current infrastructure that is sustainable that we don’t really want to fix what isn’t broken essentially. But what we want to do is become their strategic partner to help them, educate them, to unlock new insights and essentially just handfold them through their sustainability journey, and ultimately accelerate their net zero journey as well.
How is The National Energy Hub evolving to stay ahead of changing regulations and client needs?
It’s all about software innovation for us. So just to give you one core example at the moment: one of our client bases is institutions, hedge funds, and family offices. Through there, we gain access to market research and insights that other companies or similar companies like ourselves don’t get access to, and we actually use that to our benefit and our clients’ benefit. One of those benefits is we have basically done a joint venture with a US-based software firm with a patented technology. Essentially, what that technology does is it takes existing solar PV and battery storage and heat pumps and EV charge points, and it can completely automate and optimise the entire energy system. So it’s energy management orchestration. The software is the only software on the market within the UK that is supplier and hardware agnostic. So if you’ve got different types of solar panels or different types of EV charge points, we can remotely integrate the software with your existing infrastructure without actually needing to even step foot on the property. We actually use machine learning and artificial intelligence to absorb the customer’s energy usage data, how they charge, how they use the heat pumps, how they use the solar PV and the batteries. We basically connect all of that together, give them some insights, and essentially orchestrate the whole system for them so they don’t have to lift a finger.
As a comparison, at the moment, if a hotel has solar PV and battery storage on site, they’re most likely using multiple applications, multiple software points within their infrastructure. There’s no core software that can actually do what our software can do at the moment. So it’s a completely unique offering, and we can do that for existing systems, or we can look to fund new infrastructure for the hotels and include the optimisation software for them. So again, it reduces the payback periods, it generates revenue for them, and can increase carbon and cost savings substantially. One example is solar PV can save you 30%. Adding battery in can save you another 30 to 40%. But the optimisation software can generate significantly more savings, anywhere between another 20 to 30%. And we are eventually looking to achieve net zero energy bills for businesses, and in particular hotels, as part of that energy resilience and energy independence piece as well.
