Business Energy for Bakeries

Carbon Trust work on bakery ovens put them at 35 to 45% of a site's total carbon emissions, which makes the oven comfortably the largest single thing in the building. That research looked at plant bakeries rather than high street shops, so treat it as the shape of the problem rather than a figure for your own site.

Hot air leaving the oven through its flues. The same Carbon Trust work found that in a typical direct-fired gas oven around 20% of the gas used exits through the flues and makes no contribution to baking. Matching extraction to what the oven is actually producing, rather than running flues flat out, is where the recoverable share sits.

In plant baking, yes, and the principle carries down. The Carbon Trust trials found that dynamically matching exhaust fans to the volume of gases inside the oven could save 4.7%, worth about £14,000 a year on an industrial site, paying back in one to five years. A craft bakery will not see that sum, but full batches, fewer heat-ups and sensible flue settings all pull in the same direction.

It can. A large share of your consumption falling outside standard business hours is exactly the case where a two-rate or time-of-use contract may pay, and it is also the case most often priced on a wrong assumption. We work from your meter data rather than a rule of thumb.

Refrigeration, which catches most operators out. Monitoring of fourteen UK commercial kitchens found refrigeration took 41% of kitchen electricity, more than any single piece of cooking equipment, because it runs every hour of the year while cooking happens in bursts. Cooking took the other 59%, led by fryers at 14%, combination ovens at 12% and grills at 12%.

20%, in almost every case, plus the Climate Change Levy, because this is business premises. The reduced 5% rate applies only at very low consumption, which a working kitchen will exceed comfortably. We confirm your position as part of the comparison rather than leaving you to find out from the first bill.

If peak demand reaches 100kW it is a legal requirement. Plenty of kitchens get there once you add refrigeration, cooking and extraction together. It is worth having rather than merely tolerating: half-hourly data lets a supplier price the load you actually have instead of an assumed profile.

Yes. Multiple sites can move onto one supplier with a single renewal date, even where the current contracts all expire at different times. It cuts the admin and the combined volume usually sharpens the rate.

Around four to six weeks from agreement to go-live, with no interruption to supply and nothing to change in the kitchen.