SUDNYA is flexible in the manner in which it delivers benefits to its customers. There are three principal methods of obtaining SUDNYA’s services, each having its own benefits and suitable for a distinct class of customer needs. All the methods are directed towards a performance based remuneration for SUDNYA, which ensures that customers would obtain large, long-term savings.
The Master Energy Services Agreement (MESA) is a comprehensive agreement that governs the relationship between SUDNYA and the customer over the period of their association.
Suitability
The MESA is suitable for customers who have large energy bills say over Rs. 3 crores/ year and who might have a number of different measures that could be implemented in their facility. The MESA is a fairly long document as it must address the concerns and protect the interests of both, the customer as well as SUDNYA over their fairly long period of association. It has a number of advantages as listed below.
Benefits:
- It requires only one set of initial negotiations between the customer and SUDNYA, after which they assume the roles of energy partners and can address energy cost reduction together.
- It ensures that the programme benefits shall be at least equal to the customer’s minimum expectations as agreed to.
- The customer pays only for what is implemented. SUDNYA bears the cost of Measures being developed that do not meet minimum criteria.
- All costs incurred for the projects ultimately form a part of the project cost and are covered by SUDNYA’s Minimum Savings Guarantee. This comforts customers when a Measure incurs considerable soft costs on study, analysis and engineering in relation to the hard costs of equipment and implementation work.
- It aligns SUDNYA’s interests with the customer’s interests, and ensures that they share the common long-term objective of maximising the reduction of energy costs.
- It makes SUDNYA’s working transparent to the customer, and gives them the right to demand any technical or commercial information relating to their project.
- It facilitates financial planning as an Energy Master Plan is drawn up early in the programme and forms the basis of the implementation plan.
- It may allow bundling of strong and relatively weak, but measures important from a facility upgrade point of view, to be bundled together under a single financing package. Thus, a necessary facility upgrade, which otherwise would not meet either corporate investment policy criteria or be suitable for external funding, might be possible on a paid-from-savings basis.
- It leaves no loose ends as all aspects of the relationship are defined.
Mechanism:
The MESA envisages SUDNYA developing Energy Cost Reduction Measures (ECRMs) in a stage-wise manner that leaves the customer totally in control of the project. A tabular representation of the process is given below:
Funding by | Stage | Cash Flow |
| | Sudnya | Customer |
Customer | Sign Agreement | +ve | -ve |
Sudnya | Energy Master Plan Preparation | -ve | 0 |
Sudnya | Concept Report | -ve | 0 |
Sudnya | Technical Report | -ve | 0 |
Sudnya | Feasibility Report | -ve | 0 |
Customer/ External | Implementation | +ve | -ve |
Sudnya | Measurement & Verification | +ve or -ve | +ve or 0 |
Each progressive stage is commenced only after a written approval of the customer. If any Measure being developed does not meet Minimum Criteria agreed to in the MESA, work on that Measure is stopped at that stage, and SUDNYA does not recover that costs incurred on that Measure from the customer. This ensures that the customer pays only for Measures that are actually implemented. SUDNYA thus takes significant development risks on projects.
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