Key terms
Peak shaving on a commercial site
Peak shaving is holding a site's maximum demand below a chosen level, usually by discharging a battery or running on-site generation.
Unlike demand side response, peak shaving only refers to the reduction in a building's demand curve, as opposed to encompassing broader responses in demand in response to signals from the grid.
Lupa was built to make peak demand something a commercial occupier can size and act on themselves.
Distribution charges are at their highest during defined bands and shaving peak load during these periods is often beneficial. However, the larger constraint is often physical: a building that wants to add vehicle charging or electric heating usually finds that the limiting factor is the existing grid connection, and an application for more capacity can take years and carry a reinforcement cost.
Lupa models a building's load against its actual electricity tariff to determine how much can be saved by adopting peak shaving, and indeed whether chasing these savings over other potential sources of revenue is the optimal outcome. Lupa also determines how peak shaving can allow a site to increase its future load to accommodate electrified forms of heating and/or a fleet of EVs without increasing its grid capacity. Connection queues now run into years, and on many sites freeing up that headroom often turns out to be worth more than the savings themselves.
01
Create your baseline
Upload interval data and an electricity invoice for the building, and Lupa reads both into the platform without anything being keyed in by hand.
Where interval data is not available, the load profile can be built in the platform from the location, the type of operation, the operating hours and the heating system. Tariffs can be taken from the catalogue in the same way.
Upload or build from scratch
02
Enter site constraints
Enter the maximum rooftop solar system the site can accommodate, alongside the maximum battery size and the site's import and export capacity where these are known.
Left blank, default values are used based on the building type and size.
Site constraints
03
Evaluate multiple scenarios
A site might be planning to electrify its fleet of vehicles, replacing gas heating with heat pumps, or moving to a different supply contract. Each scenario can be modelled separately within the same analysis.
Scenarios
Average daily profile
04
Every option compared on the same terms
Every workable size of solar and battery is priced across a full year at half-hourly resolution on the site's own tariff.
Capital cost, net present value, rate of return, payback and emissions are produced for each one, and the options within a scenario can be compared on whichever measure matters most to the project.
Every option ranked
05
Out to the people who would build, operate and maintain itin build
The chosen option can be sent to the procurement platform, where local EPCs and aggregators evaluate the project and submit proposals.
Out to procurement