Businesses are facing up to buying their first carbon credits under the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme in April 2012, but the financial costs of the scheme can be reduced in future years by installing energy-saving equipment such as Dimplex air curtains.
The CRC EES aims to cut carbon emissions from non-domestic buildings and from April, large organisations must buy carbon credits to offset carbon emissions, at the rate of £12 per tonne. Although the costs to individual businesses have already been set for the first year, installing air curtains now can reduce future costs – as well as making substantial savings on energy costs right away.
Open doorways can be a major challenge to energy efficiency in commercial premises and air curtains offer the perfect solution, providing an invisible curtain of air to separate internal and external environments when access points are open. Installing air curtains can give a head start to reducing energy use by cutting a building’s energy consumption by up to an industry-recognised 30 percent.
Phil Chilton, product manager for commercial installed products at Dimplex, says: “Air curtains have huge potential to cut carbon emissions when used with heating systems, and can have an even greater impact on energy use from air conditioning systems. With businesses of all types under increasing financial pressure from tough trading conditions, and now the CRC EES adding to costs, air curtains can create high levels of savings for relatively little investment.”
Although delayed by a year and changed from its original structure, whereby payments made would be directed to reward better-performing companies, the CRC EES will really start to bite from April, being described by some as an ‘energy tax’. The scheme applies to every public or private organisation in Britain using more than 6,000 Megawatt hours (MWh) of electricity a year on a half hourly meter, and businesses failing to comply face punitive fines.
But keeping control of carbon emissions doesn’t have to be complicated. Dimplex has a full range of air curtains that can all have a positive impact on carbon emissions wherever fitted, from the CAB and DAB ranges installed over doors of 3m or 4m respectively, to the prestigious ARC designer models and heavy duty IAB range for large industrial premises.
To further reduce energy use, Dimplex air curtains are supplied with a built-in Building Energy Management System (BEMS) interface as standard and they can also be controlled via timers, presence detectors and temperature controls, which together improve the overall performance of a heating or cooling system.