Energy efficiency and renewables
The foundations the other two programmes rest on. A payback figure built on the wrong assumptions is still wrong when a model is attached to it.
Learning to check the numbers
An organisation weighing an efficiency programme or a rooftop array is usually handed a single payback figure. The figure is rarely wrong on its own terms. It is simply built on assumptions that are not on the page — and a number you cannot rebuild is a number you cannot trust.
Change the assumed self-consumption rate by fifteen points, or the discount rate by two, and a confident seven-year payback becomes an eleven-year one. Both are defensible. The skill is knowing which dials exist and where they were set.
This programme teaches that skill: we publish the arithmetic, state every input, and give ranges rather than single numbers — so you can rebuild any figure you are given on your own data.
What we cover
Energy audits and efficiency measures
How to find where energy is actually being lost rather than where it is easiest to measure, how to sequence measures so the cheap ones do not get skipped in favour of the visible ones, and how to build a baseline robust enough to demonstrate savings afterwards.
Photovoltaics: sizing and payback
Sizing against a real consumption profile rather than an annual total, realistic yield expectations under Bulgarian irradiation, the effect of self-consumption on the entire business case, degradation, and how grid connection arrangements change the answer.
Storage fundamentals
What a battery is actually for in a given installation — peak shaving, self-consumption, resilience, arbitrage — and why systems specified without deciding this tend to underdeliver against all four.
Monitoring practice
Metering that produces data someone uses. Sub-metering strategy, sensible reporting intervals, and the discipline of tying every monitored quantity to a decision it could change. This is also where this programme hands over to AI for energy.
House rules for every figure we publish
- Every calculation states its assumptions inline, in a block like this one.
- Results are ranges, with the inputs that move them identified.
- Bulgarian irradiation, tariff and regulatory conditions, not figures carried over from another market.
- Where a measure does not pay back, we publish that too.
Who this is for
- Facility and energy managers building an internal case.
- Finance staff asked to approve a capital request with a payback figure attached.
- Municipalities assessing proposals for public buildings.
- Non-profits and schools without in-house technical capacity.