Many energy supply enterprises go bust in Germany nowadays: twice as much in 2021 as in the years before (and not only there).
The reason is that they try to absorb the huge variations in the wholesale energy price for the supply contracts that these suppliers have committed at constant price to their customers. Someone has to pay the price increase and these suppliers took this responsibility. It is obvious that this is a kind of insurance activity and not sustainable. Now these customers must look for a new supplier and they can count on higher prices. So for them and all the other consumers, high prices are a fact of life.
There are only a few ways for an organisation to keep up the services or production with huge variations in energy prices:
⁃ Increase prices of the own services or products, so the customer will pay the increase
⁃ Lay off employees and organise that the remaining are working more efficiently or harder
⁃ Produce energy for the own consumption at a lower price than the market asks
⁃ Increase the Energy Efficiency
All these solutions make economic sense and all of them are adopted, more or less. The fact is, the latter option is in the background as I saw in many organisations and production processes. I saw so many opportunities to do the same or better with less energy in my different jobs as energy engineer that I can be sure that this is missed chance.
The reason for neglecting it is that it is complicated because of the many ways that one can improve Energy Efficiency. Therefore, an Energy Manager is needed in many organisation to help in this situation. A good one will always look for Energy Conservation Opportunities (ECOs) with collateral benefits, which will create more value than only the savings on the bill, but I expect that these latter will become more convincing in coming times.