Jason Martin - Energy Consultant and ESOS Lead Assessor at Professional Energy People
How did you get into a career in energy and sustainability?
As a graduate chemical engineer, energy and the laws of thermodynamics have always been central to what I do. My early career, in the late 1990s, was with Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), creating pigments for use in paints and plastics. I specialised in filtration at first, then moved into control and instrumentation, gaining experience with Foxboro I/A Series controllers, where SCADA and 4-20mA analogue instrumentation loops were standard.
As ICI demerged and the UK chemical industry went into decline, I needed a career change and found it in the newly emerging Building Management Systems (BMS) industry. I remember thinking that going from controlling all manner of chemicals to just two fluids, air and water, would be an easier life. As a young BMS engineer I learnt the ins and outs of building services and the controls systems of the day, Trend, Honeywell, Satchwell, Landis & Gyr / Landis & Staefa (later Siemens Building Technologies), Johnson Controls and Andover Controls among them. I was also at the forefront of BMS integration, the beginnings of what we now call smart buildings.
This work took me to some interesting places, from secure government and defence sites I cannot discuss, to the Old Bailey and Broadmoor Hospital, though I should say my own criminality and mental capacity were never in question. Some of those years were with Honeywell, which took me onto regulated fine chemical manufacturing sites, Syngenta's Huddersfield Manufacturing Centre among them, where the controls I was working on sat inside a validated process and could not simply be changed. Throughout, energy efficiency was always in mind, well-maintained plant naturally means energy and financial savings over the long term.
How did you become involved with ESOS?
My first dedicated energy management role was with the University of Leeds, where I was part of the team that developed the university's first energy and sustainability policy. This is where my knowledge expanded into energy legislation, Climate Change Agreements, the European Union Emissions Trading System (now UK ETS), energy contracts and carbon taxes, and where some of the first Display Energy Certificates and EPCs were produced.
I then moved to E.ON Controls, as part of a team of energy managers identifying energy saving initiatives across the client base. Every measure was considered, but BMS optimisation projects consistently delivered the lowest payback times. It was during this period that Phase 1 of ESOS was introduced, and we produced one of the first ESOS-compliant reports. With the workload, it was decided that one team member would formally become the ESOS Lead Assessor, but we all worked to the same standard and I understood the role fully. I personally undertook around 40 ESOS assessments in Phase 1.
I later joined E.ON's UK Solutions team, working on larger concept and feasibility projects for organisations including blue-chip data centres, Transport for London and DS Smith. One that stayed with me was a former ICI site in Widnes, Unifrax Ltd, manufacturing Saffil, a replacement for asbestos, where I acted as technical advisor on a concept and feasibility study identifying substantial annual savings through CHP and demand-side response, followed by High Voltage (HV) switch room and substation upgrade design.
Covid brought redundancy, but after a pleasant break I found my current role with Professional Energy People and finally qualified as an ESOS Lead Assessor for Phase 3, as many of our Sheffield clients were caught by the eligibility test and needed guidance. Several of our clients are pharmaceutical and fine chemical manufacturers, where I handle Climate Change Agreement and UK ETS compliance alongside the ESOS work. I now intend to spend the rest of my career building this consultancy, so the next generation of energy professionals can give the best possible advice to the businesses we work with.
Based on your experience within the pharmaceutical industry, what are the key energy management challenges, and where are the greatest opportunities?
My pharmaceutical work has come through Climate Change Agreement and UK ETS projects rather than ESOS specifically, but the significant energy users and the efficiency opportunities are the same across all three regimes. It is one of the most energy-intensive sectors I deal with, though not for the reason people tend to assume. The energy is not going into transforming raw material in the way it would in steel or cement. It is going into maintaining the conditions under which product can legally and safely be made. That distinction shapes everything about where the savings are and why they are hard to capture.
For a mid-sized pharmaceutical manufacturing site, annual energy spend can run comfortably into the millions of pounds, split across imported electricity and natural gas, with water and effluent treatment adding a further significant utility cost. These are indicative ranges, not figures from any one site, and they vary widely with product type and site age, so I would always caveat them and work from metered data in practice. The important point is the profile: a large and relatively fixed baseload that runs whether or not product is moving through the plant.
Cleanroom HVAC is almost always the single largest load, and the running order below it barely changes from one site to the next. Sterile and aseptic manufacturing requires tightly controlled temperature, humidity and air cleanliness, governed in the UK by EU (Good Manufacturing Practice) GMP Annex 1, which sets the Grade A to D framework, with the particulate classification coming from ISO 14644. Those classifications dictate very high air change rates, often ten to twenty air changes per hour (ACH) or considerably more in the highest grades, with much of that air conditioned, filtered and in many cases run single-pass rather than recirculated. The specification has to be met both at rest and in operation, so the environment is held continuously, twenty-four hours a day, even when a suite is not actively producing.
After HVAC, the major users are typically steam generation for process heating, sterilisation and clean steam, purified water and water for injection (WFI) systems generated and distributed to pharmacopoeia standards via validated ring mains, chilled water and glycol cooling, compressed air, and refrigeration and cold storage for temperature-sensitive materials. Clean-in-place and sterilise-in-place (CIP/SIP) cycles add further steam, water and effluent load. Freeze-drying, where present, is a notable additional electrical and cooling demand.
Energy management on these sites always comes second to GMP and product quality, the framework compiled in the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) guidance widely known as the Orange Guide. Anything that touches a validated environment, an air handling setpoint, a water system, a cleanroom pressure regime, cannot simply be adjusted to save energy. It sits inside a validated state, and change runs through formal change control, requiring requalification (Installation Qualification, Operational Qualification and Performance Qualification) and quality sign-off, with validation itself following recognised principles such as those in GAMP 5 (Good Automated Manufacturing Practice, 5th Edition). That is a legitimate barrier, and it is the single biggest reason good energy opportunities stall on pharma sites. It is the same constraint I first met at Huddersfield. Alongside it sit ageing plant on long-established sites, continuous operation that removes the option of switching things off, and a strong cultural priority on supply continuity and compliance over efficiency. On many sites, sub-metering is also weaker than the energy spend would justify, so it can be genuinely difficult to attribute consumption to specific systems in the first place.
The largest savings almost always sit in the HVAC system, because the ancillary equipment uses more energy than the production plant itself. The highest-value measure I typically see is demand-based control of air change rates, letting suites setback to a lower but still classified state when nothing is being made. Most sites hold full rates around the clock. Heat recovery is the next big one, taking heat from exhaust air and from process and compressor systems, and feeding it back into space and process heating. Beyond that, the well-established measures apply: variable speed drives on air handling units, pumps and compressors, optimisation of steam and condensate systems, and compressed air leak detection and pressure optimisation, the last of which is almost always worthwhile because compressed air is expensive to generate and leaks tend to be ubiquitous.
What gets missed is almost always what nobody is measuring. Out-of-hours and non-production baseload is frequently far higher than sites expect, and simply metering and interrogating it reveals systems running at full duty when they need not be. Chilled water setpoints and free cooling are commonly left conservative. And the potential to setback classified spaces safely is often dismissed as impossible when in fact it is achievable with proper qualification.
What stops these projects is rarely the money. The harder barriers are the validation and requalification burden, and the risk of touching anything that could affect a batch. Efficiency also sits well below supply and compliance in most sites' internal priorities. The way through, in my experience, is to work with the quality and validation functions rather than around them, and to prove measures at small scale first. It also helps to make the energy case in the language the business already responds to: risk and cost certainty. Better sub-metering underpins all of it, because you cannot make the case for a measure, or prove its saving afterwards, without the data.
How are you and your clients preparing for the ESOS Phase 4 compliance deadline?
Two things are on my mind for Phase 4: the data, and whatever the Environment Agency has decided is non-negotiable this time.
The biggest lesson from Phase 3 was that organisations left it late, and the ones who struggled were those without good energy data to hand when the audit window opened. So, the first thing I encourage clients to do now is get their metering and consumption data in order, well ahead of the qualification date. Good data shortens the audit and improves the recommendations. It also turns ESOS from a compliance cost into something that informs investment decisions.
Phase 4 also raises the bar, with a direction of travel towards more standardised reporting and a greater expectation that identified opportunities are acted upon, not simply logged. I tell clients not to treat ESOS as a report that sits on a shelf. It should be the evidence base for a genuine efficiency and decarbonisation programme.
So my advice is to start now, not in the final year. The audit is where the work begins.