How Carbon Lighthouse Manages Energy Use without Customer CAPEX Spend

One key challenge for the light industrial and warehouse sector has been the lack of reasonable payback for the deployment of energy monitoring technologies to monitor and manage energy use. These customers are hesitant to use their own internal capital (CAPEX) on non-core operations like energy management due to long-term paybacks and/or savings uncertainty. Guidehouse Insights anticipates that vendors that can guarantee energy savings across a portfolio of light industrial and warehouse properties by deploying a mix of energy management, energy efficiency, and onsite energy supply and load management technologies (as shown in the figure below) under financed that avoid customer CAPEX will be at a competitive advantage. 

New Integrated DER Solutions

(Source: Guidehouse Insights)

Guaranteed Savings without CAPEX

In the light industrial and warehouse sector, Carbon Lighthouse deploys a mix of energy monitoring equipment, sensors, and submetering technology across a software platform to better monitor and manage energy use. Following an analysis of building load trends and operational factors to evaluate energy savings possibilities, Carbon Lighthouse deploys the appropriate mix of lighting upgrades, rooftop HVAC unit and compressed air system upgrades, and/or rooftop solar across its energy monitoring platform. To overcome customer CAPEX challenges, Carbon Lighthouse deploys its solutions without upfront CAPEX spend by the customer under a financed guaranteed savings commitment. 

Financing Innovation on Display

As I highlighted in a recent blog, with the move away from centralized generation, traditional energy sector project financiers are looking into new customer-sited energy efficiency and distributed energy resources financing options. Generate Capital, which focuses on “as a service” energy sector project financing, recently announced a $65 million project finance commitment to fund Carbon Lighthouse's platform-based deployments. 

In my research, I focus on how C&I energy users and vendors are examining new business models to deploy an integrated set of energy management, energy efficiency, and onsite energy supply and load management technologies across a portfolio of properties. Guidehouse Insights will be closely watching the continued rollout of Carbon Lighthouse’s new financed, platform-based business models to help light industrial and warehouse building customers to better visualize their energy use and manage their energy spend.