Do you understand half-hourly metering for the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme?

We recently had a cry for help from a small local authority that had only just realised that it might  have an obligation to register for CRC, because it had been confused by conflicting advice. It's  really quite easy to decide whether you need either to register with the Environment  Agency, or make an information disclosure but, either way, this must be done by September  30^th.

There are two benchmarks involved, first whether you pay for your electricity through  half-hourly metering & second, the amount of electricity consumed.

For the purpose of deciding what to do about CRC you need to confirm whether you have  half-hourly metering anywhere in the system during 2008. There are four types of metering  that could bring you in to CRC: -

1. Mandatory half-hourly meter: installed where the average peak demand was over 100  kW in three months out of 12.

2. Voluntary half-hourly meter

3. Automatic Meter Reading meter (AMR): This has to be a meter for measuring consumption for  charging purposes, must be read remotely (either by you or the supplier) and the data  must be made available to the purchaser.

4. Dynamic pseudo half-hourly meter: also known as an Unmetered Supply (UMS). The requirement here is that, for a number of points of consumption a meter is used to measure consumption for a reference point, which is  then multiplied by the number of  points. For example, if you have 50 street lights, with a meter on one of them and the charge is 50 x the meter reading, this counts. If the charge is based on a theoretical  calculation, e.g. 50 x time x wattage, it doesn't count.

If you don't have any of these, then you don't need to register.

If you have half-hourly metering, you need to aggregate all of the electricity bills for which your  organisation is responsible. If you're a local authority, you might need to consider council offices, schools, emergency services, street lighting, leased accommodation & more. For  electricity consumption between 0 & 3000 Mwhr/year, all you need to do is to make a simple  on-line declaration. Between 3000 & 6000 Mwhr/year you need to make a slightly more detailed declaration.

Over 6,000 MwHr/year triggers a full registration &, if you're in this position but haven't started, there are reams of guidance to wade through & you'll need all  hands to the pump to get your registration completed in time. As a rule of thumb, if your annual electricity bill is above £0.5m, you're likely to need a full registration.