Stop Selling Assets: Is This A New Model For Commercial Net Zero?
Renewr believes the barrier to commercial renewable deployment isn't simply technology or demand. It's the transactional model used to sell it.
Renewr's answer is to fund long-term managed energy services rather than individual assets.
We met Dan Proctor from Renewr to understand what they're doing, why it's different and whether a change in the way renewable infrastructure is funded and managed could accelerate the adoption of commercial net zero.
There is a problem in commercial buildings.
The cost of heating, cooling and running them is going north. Energy markets that many businesses once regarded as a fairly predictable operating expense are once again being buffeted by events thousands of miles away.
This isn't theoretical.
UK wholesale gas prices rose 17% in August and were 90% higher than a year earlier. Electricity system prices rose 23% during the month and were 84% higher year-on-year. Early September indicators suggest that upward pressure has continued.
Almost six in ten businesses questioned by the ONS in late August expressed some degree of concern about energy prices.
Yet the barrier to switching to more resilient, locally generated energy is not necessarily a shortage of roof space for solar, installers capable of fitting heat pumps or somewhere to put a battery.
It's often something much simpler.
Capital.
“My premise is that the deployment of commercial net zero is broken.”
Dan Proctor - Renewr
Dan is very clear about what he's not suggesting.
He's not saying heat pumps can't work in commercial applications we know heat pumps can work at scale. He's not suggesting solar arrays aren't valuable to businesses, or that batteries don't increasingly have a role in managing how businesses generate, consume and buy electricity.
His argument is about the way those technologies are sold.
A business can want to decarbonise. It can have the roof. It can have the installer. It can have a technically sound design.
But somebody still has to find the capital to install it.
And that's where Renewr wants to intervene.
Proven To Work
The starting point isn't particularly revolutionary.
For decades businesses have moved from owning things to buying the outcome those things provide.
Dan's own background is in business lending and telecoms, and that's important to understanding where Renewr has come from.
Businesses once routinely bought telephone systems, servers and other expensive technology infrastructure outright. Much of that world has subsequently moved towards managed services and subscription models.
Dan believes renewable infrastructure is capable of making a similar transition.
“The biggest thing that stopped companies servitising was cash.”
Dan Proctor - Renewr
Renewr's proposition is therefore not simply to find another way for a customer to pay for a solar array.
In fact, Dan is quite insistent about that distinction.
“The funding is not the product. The managed service is.”
That is probably the easiest way of understanding the whole company.
Renewr wants installers to stop behaving solely as companies which specify equipment, install it, commission it, invoice the customer and move on to the next job.
Instead, it wants them to become long-term Managed Infrastructure Service Providers.
The customer does not buy a heat pump, solar array or battery.
They're buying the outcome.
Stop Selling Assets
“Stop selling assets, start managing outcomes.”
Renewr calls the model Renewable Energy-as-a-Service.
Under its framework, renewable and energy-efficiency infrastructure can be delivered through a long-term managed service rather than requiring the customer to make a substantial upfront capital purchase.
The service provider remains responsible for delivery, monitoring, maintenance, optimisation and lifecycle planning. The customer pays an agreed monthly service fee.
That distinction is what separates this solution from others avilable.
“The key difference in our model is that the customer does not own the asset. They're not buying an asset.”
Instead, Dan says:
“What the customer is contracting to is energy as a service via a monthly service fee.”
And that changes what happens the day after commissioning.
Under the conventional transactional model, commissioning can effectively represent the end of the project.
Under this one, it's closer to the beginning.
“Post-commissioning, they then have responsibility to manage that asset for the length of the contract.”
Renewr's own customer material divides that continuing responsibility into four areas: operate, optimise, protect and comply.
That can encompass remote monitoring and diagnostics, planned and reactive maintenance, fault management and asset health; energy and battery optimisation; tariff and export optimisation; warranty and lifecycle management; resilience; and carbon, ESG and performance reporting.
That's much more than putting a maintenance contract on top of an installation.
And Dan is blunt about the distinction.
“If you don't productise properly, it is a lease by another name.”
Or, as he put it elsewhere in our considerably less formal conversation: if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's still a duck.
Simply renaming an asset purchase a “managed service” doesn't make it one.
His test is better:
“If we took the funding out, is it still a services contract?”
If the answer is no, Renewr's argument is that you haven't really created a managed service at all.
So Where Does The Money Come From?
This is where the model gets interesting.
Renewr is not itself the funder.
And, crucially, Renewr does not need the installer to find enough cash to buy potentially hundreds of thousands of pounds' worth of equipment and then wait years to recover it from its customer.
The contract-and-cash-flow material provided to us shows the basic structure.
The customer enters into a managed service agreement with the service provider. The service provider installs and commissions the infrastructure. Once agreed funding conditions have been satisfied, the equipment invoice is settled to the service provider, covering the cost of the assets and installation.
The customer subsequently pays the monthly service fee to the service provider. Part of those contracted fees is assigned onwards to the funder, while recurring service fees remain with the service provider in return for continuing management and optimisation.
That is the bit that potentially changes the economics for an installer.
“We want to enable as many installers that have the ambition to be long-term managed service partners with the frameworks to do so - the cash, the legal framework, the funding framework, everything that's needed.”
The installer can therefore potentially receive the value required to deliver the infrastructure without having to raise the equivalent debt or equity itself, while building recurring revenues around actually managing what it installed.
Dan describes it more cautiously:
“We are not the silver bullet. We can provide a structure and the capital to build a managed service product.”
Because the capital only enables the proposition.
The service still has to be real.
One Customer, Not Four Technologies
There is another potentially important distinction.
Commercial decarbonisation rarely consists of one thing.
A building might need solar. But it may also need battery storage. It may need to electrify heat. It may need controls, monitoring, EV charging or efficiency measures.
Traditionally those can become separate projects, separate budgets and separate suppliers.
Even the PPA - the familiar route for deploying onsite solar without an upfront capital purchase - is fundamentally centred on electricity generation.
Renewr wants to broaden that idea from one funded technology into an evolving managed energy infrastructure.
“If you look at it as a whole picture rather than one asset, then all of a sudden we've got all sorts of cross-synergies from a cost-saving perspective.”
Its sales playbook consequently spans solar and other onsite generation, battery storage and flexibility, HVAC and heat decarbonisation, EV charging, efficiency measures and the monitoring and optimisation layer needed to manage them.
That means the conversation potentially changes from:
How much will my solar array cost?
to:
What does this building need to achieve over the next 15 or 20 years?
That's a very different sale.
Beyond The PPA
The comparison with Power Purchase Agreements is inevitable.
PPAs have successfully allowed organisations to deploy onsite solar without paying the upfront capital cost. A developer typically funds and operates the system while the customer buys the electricity it generates under a long-term agreement.
Renewr's argument is not that PPAs don't work.
It's that a PPA answers a narrower question.
Its supporting material argues that a solar PPA doesn't inherently solve the customer's requirements around storage, heating electrification, EV charging, efficiency or wider monitoring, potentially leaving an organisation managing several different contractual relationships.
Renewr wants the service provider to look at the estate rather than the widget.
Or as Dan puts it:
“This is all about selling on outcomes, not selling an asset.”
What Does That Actually Look Like?
The most useful way of understanding the proposition is through an actual project.
Dan showed us a proposal for a mosque where Renewr's proposed strategy brings different technologies and specialist providers together as one managed renewable-energy proposition.
The proposed infrastructure combines a surface thermal system and heat pumps with solar PV, battery storage and an intelligent optimisation layer. Rather than the customer independently procuring and then managing each component, the proposition brings them under a managed service.
Importantly, this is a proposal and modelled outcome, not evidence from a completed 15-year operating period. That's worth saying.
But it demonstrates what Renewr means by moving away from an asset-by-asset approach.
The customer isn't being asked simply whether it wants a heat pump.
The starting point is what the site needs from its energy infrastructure.
“The customer proposition is pretty simple: no capex, revenue budget item, fully managed and optimised assets.”
The project also illustrates why long-term management is different.
Installing several technologies that interact with one another doesn't guarantee that they'll continue operating together optimally for the next decade.
Renewr's proposition makes that continuing performance somebody's job.
What Happens When Something Goes Wrong?
There is an obvious question when someone proposes a 15-year relationship.
What happens if one of the companies isn't there in year seven?
This is perhaps one of the more interesting parts of the proposition because Renewr is explicitly trying to design around the longevity problem.
The customer proposal includes contractual “step-in” provisions intended to allow the service to continue or specialist support to be replaced if a delivery partner breaches its obligations or becomes insolvent.
Dan explained it rather more directly:
“If the service provider goes out of business, I will take that recurring fee and pay it to another service provider so they can continue the service for the customer.”
There is an important change in current methodology here.
That is Renewr's proposed contractual protection, not a guarantee from us that every possible failure scenario has disappeared.
Long contracts create long risks.
Technology changes. Companies disappear. Buildings change hands. Energy markets move. Equipment reaches the end of its life.
The credibility of Energy-as-a-Service will therefore depend as much upon what happens in years eight, 12 and 15 as what happens on installation day.
Renewr appears to understand that.
Its model specifically makes continuing value part of the proposition rather than treating maintenance as an afterthought.
This Changes The Installer Too
And this may be the most consequential part of the whole thing for the people walking around Solar & Storage Live this week.
Renewr isn't merely proposing a different way for their customers to access equipment.
It's proposing a different type of installer.
“Installers stop at number two. Our partners do everything.”
Dan's broader lifecycle runs from assessment and mobilisation through design and delivery into operation, optimisation, reporting and eventually reinvestment.
That requires a different commercial relationship with the customer.
It also requires different skills.
A brilliant solar installer doesn't automatically become brilliant at energy strategy, long-term customer management, battery optimisation, reporting and lifecycle planning because somebody has put “as-a-Service” on the proposal.
Renewr's onboarding documentation reflects that. Prospective service providers have to go through approval and underwriting, put the necessary commercial agreements in place and develop the capability to sell and deliver the service.
That gatekeeping is vital.
Because providing access to funding without imposing continuing responsibility would simply create another mechanism for selling more equipment.
That isn't what Renewr says it wants to build.
“We're enabling renewable energy service providers to go on that transition without having to raise debt or dilute equity.”
The prize for the installer is obvious: larger relationships, continuing service revenue and customers that potentially remain customers for years rather than weeks.
The obligation is equally obvious.
You have to remain responsible for the outcome.
Why Now?
There is an intriguing timing to all of this.
The technology required to substantially reduce the energy consumption and carbon emissions of many commercial buildings already exists.
Monitoring and control systems are becoming more sophisticated.
The harder question is increasingly how to combine them, pay for them, manage them and persuade organisations to commit to them.
At the same time, the reason businesses might want greater control over their energy has become difficult to ignore.
Wholesale energy markets have again demonstrated how quickly events outside the UK can feed through to British energy costs. Ofgem says wholesale costs can typically account for around 40% of a business electricity bill and 60% of a gas bill, although the precise proportion varies substantially by business and contract.
That doesn't mean every company should immediately cover its roof with solar or replace every boiler with a heat pump.
It does mean the business case for understanding energy as infrastructure, rather than simply another bill arriving each month, is becoming harder to dismiss.
Funding Isn't The Product
Which brings us back to the distinction Dan was so keen to make.
Renewr is not trying to become known as a finance company.
It is trying to create the commercial plumbing that allows somebody else to become a long-term renewable infrastructure service provider.
Funding is part of that plumbing.
It isn't what the customer is supposed to be buying.
“The funding enables, but the service is the product.”
That's an important distinction, because without it this could easily look like another mechanism for getting a solar array, battery or heat pump through the customer's door.
Renewr's ambition is considerably bigger.
It wants to change the point at which the installer considers the job finished.
Instead of commissioning.
Perhaps it's when the infrastructure finally reaches the end of its useful life.
“Every customer's got their own objective. The only way to make it work is if they have a fair customer outcome as their shared objective.”
There will be questions for Renewr as this scales.
How transferable are these long contracts when buildings are sold? How will service standards be enforced over 15 or 20 years? How will ageing technologies be replaced? How readily will public-sector procurement and accounting rules accommodate the structure? And, ultimately, can enough installers make the cultural transition from selling equipment to accepting responsibility for performance?
Those questions could stick in the craw.
But they don't make the underlying question any less interesting.
We will spend our time at Solar & Storage Live looking at newer panels, smarter batteries, better inverters, software and increasingly sophisticated ways of producing and managing energy.
Perhaps one of the more important innovations at the show won't be another piece of hardware.
It might be a different answer to three much simpler questions:
Who funds it?
Who is responsible for it?
And who is still making sure it works 15 years later?