Making energy service companies (ESCOS) future fit

Abstract

Energy service companies (ESCOs) are faced with a range of challenges and opportunities associated with the rapidly changing and flexible requirements of energy customers (end users) and rapid improvements in technologies associated with energy and ICT. These opportunities for innovation include better prediction of energy demand, transparency of data to the end user, flexible and time dependent energy pricing and a range of novel finance models. The liberalisation of energy markets across the world has leads to a very small price differential between suppliers on the unit cost of energy. Energy companies are therefore looking to add additional layers of value using service models borrowed from the manufacturing industry. This opens a range of new product and service offerings to energy markets and consumers and has implications for the overall efficiency, utility and price of energy provision.