Blog: A year of growth and innovation ahead for TEC membership – Adam Clarke – Managing Director
2024 was a landmark year for TEC – celebrating thirty years of empowering our members, sharing opportunities and talking through challenges together. Looking ahead, 2025 promises to be even more exciting as we consider the evolving and wide-ranging energy needs of our membership. We sat down with our Managing Director Adam Clarke to discuss TEC’s plans and ambitions over the coming year.
What were your key takeaways from the TEC Conference 2024?
2024 was our 30th year and our membership has continued to grow – a sign of the effectiveness of the frameworks we’ve put in place and the willingness of the members to work together.
It struck me at the conference just how powerful we are as a group. There are a lot of commonalities in the issues that members face and we believe that a lot of the answers to these problems lie within the membership. In the last year the membership have collaborated more than ever, particularly in the challenging areas of energy and carbon reduction.
What have been the major challenges and opportunities for the TEC membership in 2024?
The sector is facing unprecedented financial challenges with a reduction in overseas students, a demographic shift, an increase in workplace learning and increased costs. Every penny of energy spend needs to count across the whole university estate, particularly with energy being such a significant part of an institution’s annual spend.
It was also an election year so there was a level of uncertainty created by a natural hiatus in policy. However, we are hopeful that a more stable period lies ahead. In 2025 we will be putting a greater focus on working with our framework providers and other sector leaders to ensure that the higher education sector is well positioned in the energy transition and that our voice is heard.
What will the main policy and market drivers be in 2025 and how could these impact members?
The Government’s Clean Power 2030 Plan has provided some welcome clarity on the direction of travel in the energy transition.
The sector needs to plan around grid infrastructure changes which look set to make energy even more expensive at peak times and cheaper at times of less demand. For TEC this presents an opportunity to see how we can help members reduce energy costs through ‘estate side’ energy management.
The recently launched Transformation and Efficiency Taskforce in Higher Education highlights that the Government will continue to challenge the sector to make efficiencies and find savings. We believe that the TEC Frameworks are an excellent model of efficiency and collaboration with 75% of the sector coming together to use its group buying power to extract additional value from utility supply.
Will TEC be launching any new initiatives or services which could help members reduce energy costs?
Traditionally TEC has focussed on helping members with buying energy. However, to deliver budget and carbon reductions our members are asking for support with the procurement of energy reduction solutions. So, in 2025 we aim to introduce new services to help our members address behavioural and ‘estate side’ energy management. In this way TEC will continue to deliver an enhanced shared service, providing savings through a consortium approach. Working with our BUFDG, AUDE and EAUC partners, this is likely to include onsite generation, lighting installations, Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS), enhanced metering services, accessing PPAs and financing.
2024 we made significant efficiency savings through systems investments and process improvements which has enabled us to free up our people to focus on these new services our members want.
What will TEC’s other key focuses for 2025 be?
There will be an unrelenting focus on energy risk management and any threats which could present themselves in 2025. Whilst wholesale energy markets have settled somewhat compared to previous years, they remain volatile.
We renewed the three frameworks in 2024 and worked with the members on ensuring this also provided the additional services they were looking for. This includes enabling our members to benefit from effective water management and new innovations in this space through our Water Framework. We will continue to use AI to better improve our forecasts and to help our members manage energy demand on their estates. We will also be building upon our Carbon Solutions work to provide advice, guidance and support on a range of energy reduction and decarbonisation measures.
Finally, we will continue to look for good solutioning from the membership and to share and celebrate success.
