From the kitchen to the energy market: in conversation with Ben Hall

You spent years running your own restaurant. How does someone go from that to working in energy?

“Not deliberately, I can tell you that. I opened my own place after years of thinking about it, and like everyone else in hospitality I spent my time worrying about covers, staff and margins. Energy was just another bill that arrived. Then it jumped sharply from one month to the next, and I couldn’t work out why. When I looked properly, I found I couldn’t read my own bill, and neither could anyone I asked. That bothered me enough to keep digging, and the more I understood, the more useful it became – first for my own business, and then for other people’s.”

Why do you think hospitality finds energy so difficult?

“Because nobody has ever explained it to us, and because the industry doesn’t have time. If you run a kitchen, you know exactly what every ingredient costs and where it came from. Energy is the one line where all that discipline goes out of the window – not through laziness, but because the bill is genuinely hard to read and there’s always something more urgent on fire. It’s the most expensive ingredient in the kitchen and the only one nobody specifies, tastes or questions.”

What’s the first thing you’d tell an operator to look at?

“Usage, not just price. What you’re using, when you’re using it, and where. Most kitchens have no visibility of this at all, and the same patterns come up everywhere I look: extraction running through a closed kitchen overnight, air conditioning cooling an empty space, equipment brought up to temperature long before anyone needs it. Fixing that doesn’t need to cost money. It starts with paying attention. It won’t transform every business, and what it delivers depends entirely on how a site actually operates, but it’s the easiest place to start.”

You talk a lot about non-commodity charges. Why do they matter so much?

“Because they’re the part of the bill nobody argues about, and they’re growing. Your unit rate is only a share of what you pay. The rest is made up of network costs, balancing costs, capacity market levies and policy costs – the charges that fund the maintenance and upgrade of the grid. They’re regulated, so you can’t negotiate them away, but you can understand which of them are linked to how much energy you use and when you use it. Industry forecasts suggest they’ll take a growing share of commercial bills, which makes understanding them even more important.”

What did you get wrong in your own restaurant?

“Plenty! The one I think about most is the cooker. When it came time to replace it, I looked at the induction equivalent, saw that it cost several times more, and stuck with gas. I’d make the same call again in the same circumstances because you can’t spend capital you don’t have. But the kit I bought is the kit that’ll likely still be running in ten years, and by then the rules will almost certainly have moved on. That’s the trade the whole sector is making at the moment.”

Everyone is talking about high bills. What’s the conversation the sector isn’t having?

“What the energy transition itself is going to cost. High bills get the headlines, and rightly so. But far less understood is the capital needed to electrify kitchens, carbon reporting obligations reaching ever-smaller operators, and appliances that stop being compliant with nobody noticing. None of that arrives with a headline; it arrives as a decision you have to make on a random Tuesday, usually without the information you’d want, while you’re juggling everything else. That’s the gap I’d most like to close.”

If an operator reads one thing and does one thing, what should it be?

“Stop being reactive. The bill arrives, we wince, we carry on, and then we do it again next month. Validate the bill to make sure you’re paying for what you actually use. Look at your usage and see how you can modify behaviours and operations to find reductions and savings. Check your agreed supply capacity so you’re not paying a big standing charge for nothing. And when your contract comes up, take it to market instead of letting it roll over because the letter landed in a busy week. None of that is glamorous, and none of it requires you to become an energy expert. It just requires you to stop treating energy as something that happens to you.”

Where does Equity Energies fit in?

“It’s the job I do now, and it started as the job I needed someone to do for me. We work with organisations to understand what they’re using, what they’re actually paying for, and what their options are – from contracts and billing through to broader energy strategy, and solutions like on-site generation and storage for those ready to look further. What we can do for any given site depends entirely on how it operates. But the starting point is always the same conversation I wish someone had had with me: here’s what’s on your bill, and here’s what you can do about it.”

And where’s the best pizza you’ve ever had?

“I don’t think I even need to answer that one, do I?”

Ben Hall – Business Development Manager, Equity Energies

Through the combined expertise of Centreco and Equity Energies, we help organisations design integrated energy strategies that better balance affordability, security and sustainability.