by Richard Burrell, CEO
Today marks a coming of age for our Group. As we bring all our businesses together under one roof and rebrand to AMP Clean Energy, I have been reflecting on the path that has brought us here.
When AMP was founded eight years ago our focus was on financing and developing small scale, aggregated renewable and low carbon energy projects. Whilst our business has enjoyed frenetic growth, and now spans the biomass heat and decentralised heat and power sectors, our ethos remains exactly the same.
We are still fundamentally a distributed energy business focussed on the aggregation of low carbon heat and power assets, which support the UK’s transition to a low carbon economy and we do this in a number of ways including our Urban Reserve projects which aim to bolster the growth of renewables and provide standby power generation at times of peak demand in places where electricity is in short supply. Over the coming months, we have ambitious plans to develop 50MW of smaller plants which will give us circa 15 Urban Reserve sites. We have a number of projects going through planning and I am very excited to see these move forward.
We are, of course, best known for being a market-leading fuel supplier, having acquired a number of businesses including Forest Fuels, Billington Bioenergy and Midlands Wood Fuels over recent years. Our intention in bringing all these brands together is to create the best possible customer service and provide the widest choice of services to our 4,000 customers throughout the UK. In doing so, we are able to offer a complete biomass heat service from fuel supply, service and maintenance and full heat supply contracts.
Our entire fuels team has worked incredibly hard to combine the strengths and expertise within the various businesses ahead of the winter heating season. This has involved streamlining and upgrading our systems, investing in software to improve the ordering and delivery experience and shoring up our supply chain to ensure we have a 100% dependable fuel supply. We will, of course, measure ourselves on the standard of service and feedback we receive from our customers this heating season in our annual customer satisfaction survey.
In all our areas, we have a business model which aims to fund and develop low carbon projects and assets which can help organisations decarbonise. This varies from funding a biomass heating system, ‘buying back’ a new boiler, to funding and developing an energy centre for a large industrial organisation. In fact, to date, over £50 million has been raised to finance our biomass heat and low carbon development projects in our off-balance vehicle.
As we rebrand to AMP Clean Energy, this feels like a logical progression, which neatly brings together the different strands of our business. Whilst our customer offerings will continue to evolve and respond to changes in the energy market, our core will remain as a distributed energy business which brings the benefits of aggregating low carbon, decentralised energy assets to UK businesses and industry.
