Issue - meetings

Report of Corporate Director of Growth and City Development

Councillor Longford, Portfolio Holder for Energy, Environment and Waste Services introduced the report.

Dave Nicoll, CRES Customer Service and Transformation Manager, and Wayne Bexton, Director for Carbon Reduction, Energy and Sustainability, presented the report and highlighted the following:

(a)  EE Monitor Manufacture, Supply and Development

·  Nottingham City Council (NCC) owns and operates the largest district heating network in the UK. The network serves around 5,000 domestic properties and 120 commercial properties. 95% of the domestic properties on the network currently have an outdated prepayment solution installed, which is over 18 years old. Parts to repair the systems are now obsolete and the software is no longer supported. Customers only have a small number of shops in the area at which they can top up, and this is leading to them having to travel some distance to top up their prepayment device;

·  a decision by the Executive Board to bring Enviroenergy Ltd in to the Council recognised a requirement to upgrade this domestic metering and billing system, and funding was allocated within the Council’s capital programme, enabling commencement in 2022/23 to deliver this transition;

·  NCC has worked with a supplier to develop a prepayment metering solution for heat networks - this solution is called the EE Monitor, and has successfully helped other local authorities and housing associations across the UK to purchase and install the EE Monitor solution into properties they are the supplier of heat for;

·  the EE Monitor has become a commercial success since its inception, being fitted in 3,000 homes across the UK at present. As the demand for more heat networks across the UK grows, so does the opportunity for NCC to provide billing services alongside monitoring, utilising the expert teams within the Enviroenergy department. The EE Monitor is currently installed at Bentinck, Manvers and Kingston Courts in Nottingham and has proved a success;

·  there is now a need for NCC to procure the manufacturer, supplier and developer of the EE Monitor product on a long-term contract basis of 10 years, also enabling the roll out across the district heating estate within Nottingham (approximately 5,000 properties);

·  the existing prepayment metering system on Nottingham Estate is outdated and provides no control to us in managing debt and customer accounts;

·  benefits that the installation of an EE Monitor will have for our citizens and services are:

o  full control over customers’ heating accounts, enabling NCC to clawback existing debt and reduce the number of tenants who can get into debt;

o  better top up options;

o  tenants who require an engineer to manually top up their meter by £250 in order for them to not be allowed to get into debt should no longer require a visit from an engineer every few months;

o  Nottingham One and Victoria Centre have dedicated top up machines which are out of use and cannot be fixed due to requiring obsolete parts;

o  the EE Monitor device will offer all the options you expect to see in 2022, such as direct debit, online,  ...  view the full minutes text for item 31