F.01
Heat exchanger capacity charge
Contracted primary capacity exceeded secondary peak by ~38%. Renegotiation case prepared with operator.
A Grade-A 48,000 sq ft performing arts campus in Woking, plugged into Thameswey's district heating & cooling system. Mismatched primary/secondary capacities, unoptimised controls, an opaque billing structure, and four parties who'd never sat in the same room together. KEES brought them around one tracker and one set of solutions.
Cost reduction available through contract review and revised control strategy.
Heat & cooling demand reduction from setpoint and scheduling changes.
District system is already low-carbon — savings come from running less of it, smarter.
The campus was being heated and cooled by a system nobody fully owned the running of.
Italia Conti's Woking building takes heat and chilled water from the Thameswey district network. The interface — a heat exchanger pair on the primary side, secondary loops feeding studios, classrooms and a black-box theatre — sat across a contractual seam between the energy company, the developer, the FM contractor and the school.
The bills were visibly wrong: capacity charges for plant the building couldn't physically draw. Setpoints were chasing each other. Pumps were running flat out outside teaching hours. And nobody could agree whose problem it was.
KEES was brought in to do something deceptively simple — get everyone around one table, with one set of numbers, and a list of solutions ranked by who had to do what.
District network operator — primary side metering & capacity charges.
Building occupier — operational schedule, comfort, billing accountability.
Day-to-day BMS, pumps, valves & setpoints on the secondary side.
Capacity decisions on the heat exchanger & long-term capex.
Heat exchanger primary rated above what the secondary could ever consume — capacity charge being paid for headroom that wasn't usable.
Secondary circulators didn't follow occupancy. Out-of-hours flow rate identical to school day. BMS recommissioned.
Independent zones with very different schedules — once profiled separately, comfort improved and runtime dropped.
Contracted primary capacity exceeded secondary peak by ~38%. Renegotiation case prepared with operator.
Variable-speed pumps in fixed mode 24/7. Linked to occupancy schedule — instant runtime saving.
Heating & cooling setpoints overlapped in shoulder seasons — system fighting itself in studios.
Black-box theatre runs to a different schedule than teaching spaces. Now zoned and scheduled independently.
Settlement data made readable for the school's finance team — no more black-box invoices.
RACI matrix produced across the four parties. The next time something drifts, the owner is named.
District energy projects fail at the seams between parties, not in the kit. We work the seams — the contract, the BMS, the schedules — and we hold the tracker until the actions are owned and dated.
Capacity charges, settlement formula and termination clauses. What's actually being paid for, not what's assumed.
Twelve months of trends from the BMS, twelve months of settlement data from the operator. Reconcile.
The diagram never matches reality. Verify primary/secondary kit, valving, sensor locations and current setpoints in person.
One room, one tracker, one set of numbers. Each finding gets an owner and a date — no abstaining.
Weekly check-ins until 11/14 actions closed. The remaining three sit on a longer capex cycle, with funding routed.
We'd been trying to make the four parties meet for two years. Kiro got everyone in a room and around the same numbers within a fortnight. The bill is now something we can read.
If you're paying for capacity you can't draw, or running pumps no one's set the schedule on, tell us your set-up. The first call is honest and free.