Going beyond bill validation: in conversation with Chris Tarr

You’ve been in the industry for about 20 years. How did you end up at Equity Energies?

“By a slightly indirect route. I’ve spent my career working at various consultancies, on both the energy and water sides. Most recently I was Director of Water Services, leading a full end-to-end consultancy with a team covering everything from BDMs to procurement engineers to sustainability specialists. After being there for a while, I wanted a new challenge and to get back to the energy side. When the opportunity came up at Equity Energies to build an in-house bureau service, that felt like the right move.”

What does Head of Bureau Services actually involve?

“It begins with things most people responsible for energy will be familiar with, like bill validation. Making sure clients are being charged correctly, that contract rates are applied properly, picking up estimated reads, flagging missed invoices. We also do the financial reporting: accruals, budgets, cost of consumption. That’s all important, but it’s also what every consultancy in the market does. The reports might look slightly different from one provider to the next, but fundamentally they cover the same ground. This has been around since the market deregulated in the 90s. We wanted to offer something more, so since joining I’ve been focused on building out the more analytical reporting that goes beyond that basic level.”

What does ‘going beyond’ actually look like?

“Two areas, mainly. The first is carbon reporting. That gives clients a breakdown of their carbon output against their electricity and gas usage: intensity per kilowatt hour, most and least efficient sites, the full picture. If a business has ESOS obligations or internal sustainability targets, or needs to feed data into a wider ESG disclosure, it provides that baseline and lets them track progress over time.

“The second is energy intensity reporting. That’s where it gets interesting for clients who want to act on their consumption, not just to measure it. You take a metric relevant to that business, whether that’s square footage, turnover, footfall or production output, and compare energy use against it across the portfolio. So instead of just knowing that your biggest site spends the most, which is obvious, you can see which sites are genuinely inefficient relative to their size or activity. Two stores that are identical in square footage and turnover, but one is using twice the energy. That’s where you want to look.”

How do you make that accessible to someone who isn’t an energy specialist?

“That’s the crucial bit. If you hand a finance director a cost and consumption report with 200 lines on a spreadsheet, they’re not going to know where the problems are. Our reporting uses league tables, colour coding and red-amber-green breakdowns. You can see at a glance which sites aren’t performing. If someone needs to make the case internally for spending money on efficiency measures, they need to be able to do it quickly, not hand over a spreadsheet and hope for the best. A clean league table that says ‘these are your five least efficient sites, and this is why’ is worth more than any amount of raw data.”

Can you give an example of how this changes decisions?

“Solar is a good one. A client might have someone on site who’s keen on solar panels because they’ve got them at home and thinks they’re brilliant, and they push for it. But is that the best return on investment across the whole portfolio? Maybe, maybe not. With intensity reporting you can rank the sites where efficiency measures will deliver the most, so you’re not picking based on who makes the most noise or which building has the biggest roof. You’re making a data-led decision. And you can prove it afterwards, because you’ve got a before and after on the same metric. That makes it much easier to get sign-off, and much easier to demonstrate value once the work’s been done.”

Different types of organisations presumably use this in different ways?

“The message is broadly the same, but the motivation differs. A high street retailer with published sustainability targets is probably already thinking about this. They need to demonstrate progress publicly, and brands like that have always been more proactive about it. A local authority has to justify how public money is being spent, so being able to show that specific buildings were targeted for a reason, backed by data, is important if they’re ever asked those questions. A manufacturer that’s a massive energy user but has no public-facing pressure might not think they need it, but they’ve often got the most to gain. For a lot of clients, we’re the ones saying ‘did you know we can do this for you?’ because they don’t realise that level of insight is available.”

You’ve said this isn’t the most glamorous area of the industry.

“It’s the part that’s been around so long it’s almost taken for granted. Most clients, if everything’s running smoothly, just want a quiet life from their bureau service. That means it can become background noise, and as a consultancy you end up in a race to the bottom on price because everyone’s offering essentially the same basic reports.

“But I don’t find it dry, and it doesn’t take long to convince clients of the same, especially when they see how it can save them money! Once you’ve worked in optimisation, you can’t switch it off. I walk into a building and I’m looking at whether the heating’s on with the windows open. Someone once told me it’s like being in the Matrix, except instead of code it’s open windows and radiators on full blast. That’s not far off, to be honest.

“I once did a survey at a pub where the cellar door was broken. Cellars must be kept at a specific cold temperature, so because the door wasn’t closing properly the cooling system was working overtime, costing them a fortune. Nobody on site had connected it to the energy bill, it was just a broken door to them. That’s the kind of thing this reporting helps you spot at scale.”

And finally: is there a fix you’ve seen that’s stuck with you?

“The padlocked thermostat. At a previous office, the heating controls were in a little plastic cage with a padlock on them. One person had the key, otherwise someone would turn it up, someone else would turn it down, and it would just run constantly. That’s a good analogy for energy management; someone has to take ownership of it.”

Over the coming weeks, Chris will be exploring both carbon reporting and energy intensity analysis in more detail. The first part will look at what carbon accounting means for businesses with regulatory or sustainability obligations. Part two will look at how energy intensity reporting helps target efficiency measures and capital spending where they’ll deliver the greatest impact.

Chris Tarr – Head of Bureau Services, Equity Energies