Spotlight on: Reducing carbon, boosting the bottom line and bringing grid connection into the 21st century with SaveMoneyCutCarbon CEO Mark Sait

Mark Sait says that the UK economy will be boosted by more building and business owners engaging in carbon reduction. But standing in the way of progress is a glacial grid connection process – and, he tells Andrew Gaved, the government has to act to bring it out of the dark ages.

Mark Sait, the chief executive of SaveMoneyCutCarbon, knows he can go into meetings with potential clients knowing that the fundamental mission of his business, thanks to the brand name,  is already pretty obvious.

However, he concedes that beneath that dual mission, there is something of a longer conversation as to what the company can offer the customer, as it has grown considerably since its founding as a start-up a decade ago.

The business now offers its business customers not only an analysis of where they can reduce energy, carbon and water use, a roadmap to decarbonisation & better compliance, but also a project management and installation team to carry out the recommended technology upgrades, from LEDs to heat pumps to EV charging.

And now, thanks to being part of the publicly-owned Haydale Group, it is now bringing in house innovative solutions and products like JustHeat  a unique graphene-based underfloor heating, claimed to be unique. Of which more later.

The developing offering stems from the fact that whatever the size of the building or the owner – with customers ranging from major commercial estate owners like Moto, Hilton and financial institutions, down to SMEs – to reduce carbon requires addressing a significant number of different component parts that Sait adds are all interconnected, so the present fragmented supply chain makes it hard for the client.

“Consider all the elements involved,” says Mark, “You’ve got the solar company, the heat pump provider, the funding company, the compliance organisation, all that sort of stuff. And if you’re running a business, that fragmentation makes it really, really hard – particularly in the carbon reporting space where a lot of it can be very technical, with the Scopes One to Three and all the acronyms involved, and the fact that it’s constantly evolving. So the whole purpose of SaveMoneyCutCarbon was ‘Could we put it all in one place as an aggregator to allow you to concentrate on your core business?’”

The ‘Deliveroo of carbon reduction’

He says that an investment meeting recently, SMCC was described as the Deliveroo of sustainability. He concedes that this might not be viewed by everyone as a compliment, but the analogy is a good one: “The investor said. ‘I know where my local restaurants are, but Deliveroo puts them all in one place, and it does all the quality checks, then makes it very easy for me to buy on my phone.”

But what made it particularly good as an analogy, he says, is that the investor added that the Deliveroo model also brings the user recommendations for new venues or cuisines that they wouldn’t have picked for themselves:

“If you look at SaveMoneyCutCarbon now, we have six technical centres of excellence – or think of them as business units, which are all quite complicated and running their own operations, but the customer doesn’t see it like that. Like Deliveroo, they see it as one place for their needs. Because, yes we are a consultancy business that takes people on the journey from decarbonisation plans to building audits to compliance, all in one place. But unlike a conventional carbon or M&E consultancy business, we can then help you actually do what has been consulted on – and it’s the delivered projects that produce the savings and the positive impact, not the consultancy presentation or glossy ESG mission statement.”

These centres of excellence include an energy efficiency team, which helps the client retrofit upgrades like LED lighting, motors, or pumps, through to installation of the latest heating technologies like JustHeat – Haydale’s patented system that unlocks the thermal qualities of graphene to provide a replacement for oil and gas heating. Mark adds that in future the properties of graphene will also be utilised to provide cooling fluids for energy- and water-hungry data centres. SMCC also has a sizeable water efficiency team, alongside dedicated teams for EV charging and for solar and more.

Water efficiency is fast becoming the next major issue for businesses, Mark believes, with its evolution being akin to where energy efficiency was a decade ago.

“A perfect example of the issues is a big new town they’re building outside Cambridge, near where we are based. The planning consent is in place, and everything is in line for development, but there is not enough water. So we will be helping building owners in Cambridge to improve their water efficiency effectively to free up water to build the new estate out of town.”

The final business unit is a ‘digital journey’  called OLIS, designed to cost-effectively take micro-businesses on a similar carbon journey to the one SMCC’s larger clients enjoy.

“I’m very passionate about it,” Mark enthuses, “It’s easy if you are a £10 million turnover business or a £100 million turnover business to resource a carbon commitment. But what about if I’m a £500,000 turnover business and I want to do my bit?”

Trusted technology and innovations

Supporting the business are some 45 manufacturers, which SMCC has validated and tested, to provide the technologies recommended. Some of these are very large companies – the company has just signed a platinum partnership deal with engineering giant ABB, covering supply of all its EV chargers – while others are chosen for their innovation.

One of the advantages of the SMCC model is that it can bring innovation to the market rapidly, Mark adds, because effectively its customers are asking where and how they can reduce carbon further after they have addressed the low-hanging fruit. This is where a product such as JustHeat comes in – taking away the client needing to source, validate individual products or solutions.

Alongside technology and analysis, another key resource for customers is expertise, he adds:

“Over the last 18 months, a number of businesses in sustainability have gone under, as it’s been a difficult climate for many. So we are cherry-picking the very best entrepreneurial minds, who also have technical capabilities and skills.”

A good example of this, he says, is DeviTech, a small, but highly-respected EV installation business, which was brought into the SMCC fold last year, enabling the team to service the new contract with ABB. “That business unit has grown by something like 1000% in the last 12 months because we’ve got the individual doing what they love doing and the business they started,” Mark says, “So with all this we say to the customer ‘walk in and we can help you’. It might be a single online order to a multimillion-pound deal with two and a half thousand projects done across the UK.”

A simple ‘not knowing where to start’ from a sustainability manager is just one of a clutch of barriers that are facing businesses when it comes to carbon reduction, Mark contends. Another is access to the necessary capital to do the work – and here SMCC is devising a solution, in the form of what could be deemed ‘sustainability as a service’.

A customer that can’t afford the capital outlay of, say the grid connections and technology to upgrade their estate will  be able to access a funding mechanism, which effectively outsources it all – with a lease payment based on a guaranteed carbon reduction and savings. SMCC is backing this guarantee with insurance so that there is no risk to either party – effectively Mark described it ’ renting savings’: “Would you rent £1000 of savings each month for £500? The answer would be yes if you can guarantee the £1000 savings – and we can now do that.”

“We have just signed up a school academy to a 10-year outsource. We call it Sustainability as a Service, in the same way they outsource their cleaning, payroll etc, they can now do the same with their sustainability. We run the whole thing end to end. As well as providing that direct to clients, we also provide it through the Impact Partner Programme as a package to major banks – they can then go out and introduce us to their clients, so we deliver all the services and the bank can put the measured impact back into their carbon reduction targets .”

Tackling the grid connection barrier

Mark notes that there is another barrier to decarbonising which is proving more of a headache – and it is a barrier that is proving so difficult to surmount that he believes it can only be achieved with radical government intervention: we speak of course of grid connection. Last month SMCC set out to the built environment sector just what a huge drag on carbon progress that achieving the DNO has become – suggesting the glacial pace of approvals was stalling the net zero journey of small businesses, preventing them from any kind of meaningful transition toward electrification. Mark is now calling on the government to step in and do something about it.

“From my point of view, the impact of the restrictions on the grid and the process involved is archaic and therefore it is simply not fit for purpose. The process was designed in the 70s and 80s, when probably we were only plugging 20 new things in a region into the grid a year: a couple of power stations and perhaps a new supermarket or two whatever. Although it was designed in the pre-digital world, I am sure the problem comes back to behaviour, not technology – it feels like somewhere in the DNO network, people still wait for a piece of paper to come, which they then rubber stamp before moving it to the next desk. But that slows down our growth as a company and it slows down our customers.”

Mark gives the example of a family-owned service station which has wanted to put EV charging on its site: “They had the initiative. We did all the business plans and raised the money for him. But it took a whole year after he gave us the PO, purely because of the grid connections.”

The answer, as with so many areas of the built environment, lies in a simpler digital process, he believes:

“Let’s bring all the regional network businesses together to create one application for grid connection in digital form. Let’s put in some Service Level Agreements and move the 50kW threshold up a bit. Of course, if we are talking about a power station, or fields full of solar farms of course it needs to go through all of that paperwork, but not if I am just installing two 50kW DC chargers. And let’s have a section where we have to demonstrate how much energy that’s being freed up in the building. Currently everything like that needs DNO permission, even when its probably helping the grid… We’re not talking about pumping in hundreds of billions into new grid lines. We’re just talking about making it quicker, making it digital and by freeing up smaller businesses and it will unlock the economy.”

Removing the grid obstacles will help grow the economy

And, Mark emphasises, remove the grid obstacle and businesses can get on with saving energy and money, which in turn will help the economy grow.

“The government currently thinks: ‘This war in the Middle East is affecting the economy, so let’s pump in £10 billion to support people’s energy bills or the hospitality sector,’ but it’s a one-off spend. If that money was put into energy efficiency or EV charging, you’d get a continual recurring spend and value out of it, it creates an eco-system that spurns fast-growth business like ours, rather than these big one-off hits where billions are swallowed up into a black hole and nothing changes.”

The connection between the economic value and the sustainability improvements is not made forcefully enough, he believes: “It is good business sense for instance, for a company to have electric vans so they are not affected by petrol prices going up because of the conflicts; It is good business sense to put solar on the roof – not to pump it into the grid, but to use it on site; It’s good business sense to free up water that can then be use in your processes. The government has missed that completely, in my opinion.”

And planning also needs a similar digital upgrade to match, he adds:

“I am not building a supermarket. I am putting a well-proven technology on my roof. Okay, let’s not put it on a listed building, but let’s not apply the same rule to every building…I should be able to fill a form in and get simple approval, based on the fact there are 10 other buildings around my building which already have solar installations…For instance, there is an Alfa Romeo showroom near me which, with a week’s work, could have enough solar on its roof to be virtually self-sufficient for energy. It shouldn’t need to wait ages for permissions.”

Why SMEs should care about decarbonisation

Mark nears the end of our conversation with a warning shot: For many SMEs, doing nothing will no longer be an option: “The banks tell us that around 90% of businesses are SMEs. But this applies to everyone. If you don’t start to save money on your energy & water bills and cut your carbon, you’re going to get left behind, not just because of the spikes in energy prices and the water scarcity, but also because if you want to supply the  bigger businesses – the banks, the supermarkets etc – in the future, you will have to have to do this because you will be within their Scope Three emissions…”

There is a clear need for the processes to be sped up too, because much of the new regulation surrounding energy and emission reduction – both for buildings and businesses in general – is driving building owners towards more rapid decarbonisation:

“I met a client the other day with 70,000 buildings in the UK, of which 15,000 have an EPC under a C. If they’ve not got them to a C by 2030, will they be able to rent them out? The prospective tenants are people at the energy poverty end of the market. If they go to the traditional EPC consultants, the owners then needs to find a further supplier to scope and deliver the retrofit work – it just becomes too hard and costly. They will not supply the technology or even provide the best information. So who will provide a works plan of what to do to get it from an E to a C?”

Of course, the answer, as far as Mark is concerned, is to engage SaveMoneyCutCarbon, which will supply both the EPC and the technology to achieve the energy improvement. However, his report from the client will equally serve as an encouragement for everyone involved helping to decarbonise buildings:

“He was pleased to have the answer that will move the needle – because they really wanted to move the needle. Our journey from an idea around the kitchen table to now a Plc is evidence of the need – It’s not that people don’t care about carbon reduction. It’s just that some of it is really difficult to achieve without help.”