On Friday 27^th July 2012 we blew the ordering capacity of a supplier. If you’re ordering a huge amount of OIL and expecting one small supplier to have the capacity then, of course, that would not be a surprise. But this was not a small supplier. This was one of the three biggest suppliers. The three biggest suppliers are so much bigger than the fourth, fifth, sixth and beyond that this is actually a huge issue. Of course we placed the order elsewhere and, as it turned out, across four different suppliers. This is not unusual given we have split a single order across as many as six in the past, however, what is unusual is that we did not split this order by choice we split it because of a huge flaw in this industry. We are in the middle of summer – finally – which simply acts to magnify this flaw and it outlines, with a deep sense of irony, that this industry doesn’t know the one critical piece of information it really must.

What went wrong?  Firstly, I should add it really did go a very long way wrong. The supplier could not guarantee the delivery until the end of August – that is a remarkable amount of capacity that had disappeared. How is that possible?

• It was not as if they didn’t know it was coming – this was a regular order that this company knows it will be negotiating for on that specific Friday of the month.
• It was not as if they are ambivalent about this order – this company normally falls over themselves to win it and have done so several times in the past two years.
• It was not as if the order was too much for one area – it was across NINE counties!
• It was not as if the order was too big to handle – it was two thirds the size of the order that we placed last month, which, ironically, they won.
• It was not as if there were supply, weather, strike or any other issues – we are in the middle of summer, the time when the industry and its trade body, the FPS, have been telling us we must order to alleviate supply issues in the autumn and winter months, the time we have spent money educating our members that they should be buying, and yet it seems, rather ironically, the industry still can’t get itself organised enough to respond to the orders that they are asking us to supply! Interesting.

So given all that, what was the problem?  It was too hot!  OK so what that meant was summer arrived and, apparently, that resulted in them being inundated by orders from farms, in particular, that they had not expected.

And there lies the flaw:  the one critical piece of information that the industry does not know is: what it is doing!  How can it not know what it is doing? Let me explain. Nobody in this industry knows what they are doing, on either side of the fence – supplier or buyer. How can it – nobody knows when they are going to order? Therefore, without knowing when the orders will come in the industry cannot possibly know what it is doing. They cannot plan for any of their users – home heating OIL, farmer or corporate account – because the user doesn’t know when they are going to order. What more evidence is required than one of the behemoths of the industry being unable to fulfil an order that was planned and meticulously organised, because it had taken so many orders from users that are not planned or organised? Do I need to point out the irony one more time – the industry asked us to get organsied, we did, it let us down! It now must be obvious to the industry that it really shouldn’t be looking to solve supply issues by telling users when to order – that clearly is a non-starter – it should be thinking about what it doesn’t know: when people are going to order!

The solution: solutions have been sought – gauges, monitors, auto-topup schemes and on and on – but everyone of those is also flawed. There is only one solution: SMART METERS. The Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has completely grasped the enormous benefits of putting smart meters in every home for the use of electricity and gas with a huge roll out to come, but they have only recently understood that it is even more critical for those of us that use rural energy. That was as a result of that meeting with Mr Cameron – who could see it in an instant – and passed us via Greg Barker to Charles Hendry. By the time we meet with Mr Hendry in a few weeks we will have installed, connected and begun to manage the natural evolution that will create a rural revolution.

The UK’s very first Rural Energy Smart Grid:  one thousand homes, farms and businesses will represent the UK’s very first Rural Energy Smart Grid and every owner of one of the tanks that has been connected up to the grid will know the following:

• what level of fuel they have in that tank at all times – via the web
• when they should be buying – because these users will be “informed” with live information of the level and the live price we have negotiated  
• when they should not be buying – ironically the orders that have come in from the farms that have proved the need for the smart grid would not have been placed this week, they would have been placed as part of the perfect storm order four weeks ago – see previous entries below – that would have saved all those farmers a huge amount of money!
• and among a plethora of other information the smart grid will produce, the tank owners know they will never run out again!

Both the complexities and the overall advantages for every stakeholder in the industry are too numerous to cover here, but for the supply industry itself – the FPS and its members – the supply issues that they seek to alleviate, by adopting flawed solutions like advising people when to buy, will no longer be necessary. The Rural Energy Smart Grid will create a high-tech solution to these issues and, of greatest importance, the supply industry will finally know when people are going to order, therefore, the supply industry will finally know what it is doing! 

Addendum: want to be part of The UK’s very first Rural Energy Smart Grid? It appears lots of people do, but we’d love to involve more and it would be great to hear from you: tell us how or why you or your organisation want to be part of this revolution at thinking@community-buying.com

If a picture tells a thousand words then this one would emit a very interesting stream of contradictions. The juxtaposition of quintessential rural beauty with grimy, carbon horrific industry; picturesque, quiet village life with unwelcome, noisy interruptions; tiny country roads with oversized hulking delivery trucks; and, whilst I could go on and on, maybe most important and surprising the contrast of dated last century thinking with really smart joined up thinking. This picture is a window into a massive transformation that is under way in our rural communities – it is really smart joined up thinking:

We are in the transition era: whilst Drax has announced plans today of a biomass conversion to the UK’s most polluting power station into, therefore, our biggest future power station for green energy, we don’t all have the £700 million that this will take. We have to find the most creative and innovative ways to redesign what we do, add that to what we know and create our intelligent, connected solutions. With this in mind, these are the really important words that this picture says to us:

“this tanker driver is on his break – he has earnt it. Instead of driving around the countryside taking all day to visit lots of villages to deliver his fuel, he has already been in the village for two hours and after his break he will be another hour or so. He will have delivered his entire load of 18,000 litres to 21 properties within 2 miles of each other. He drove only 18 miles to get to the village and his entire round trip will, therefore, be less than 40 miles. When asked how that compared to a normal delivery round he was quick to point out that they vary but his trip could be as much as 200 miles – five times the amount of mileage, delivery energy, carbon emissions, supplier costs, etc. Imagine the enormous impact to rural life, the UK economy, the government’s carbon emissions targets of coordinating the UK’s rural energy home delivery system.” 

How did this coordination happen? We got organised. About two years ago and what has occurred since is almost unfathomable for our community and for many others. Why? Because in addition to all the above this order was also timed at the optimum moment – this was our perfect storm order referred to in previous entries below. Everyone saved even more money than usual when they joined this particular order, because we watched all the indicators and chose the perfect moment to press the button – BUY!

I mentioned above we have to redesign what we do and add that to what we know – knowledge is power. You will be able to see from the next entry that our knowledge is about to increase dramatically and we will become even more scientific in the way we coordinate these deliveries across the UK. However, it runs even deeper than that and I defer to Mr Einstein:

“imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand”

so picture this: within months we will look at those tankers around our villages and they will become icons of transformation and all that can be achieved when we get organised, increase our knowledge and then harness our imaginations, because once done that will ensure that our joined up thinking becomes even smarter in ways that we could neither have understood or ever imagined possible.

chris@community-buying.com

Sir Tim Smit, Ed Davey – MP, Cornwall’s influencers, Eden Project, an entire county of energy buyers coming together…today’s launch shouts one thing: this is BIG! Community Buying unLimited is honoured to be one of the architects behind this massive Eden launch.

Cornwall Together is BIG! A Group Buying movement that will bring together the buying power of people and communities from right across the county, harnessing the power of that group to negotiate better prices for their energy bills. Households, businesses and community organisations can all save and at the same time create a kind of social alchemy that tackles fuel poverty and health inequality, reduces carbon emissions and creates more sustainable communities in which to live.

Conceived by Eden Project, Cornwall Together was inspired by the model created by Community Buying unLimited, and brings together the major employers Cornwall NHS, Cornwall Council and St Austell Brewery plus CEP and Unison. Initially the idea is for Cornwall Together to negotiate with energy companies to see who can offer the best deals on electricity and gas, whilst Community Buying unLimited will cover the negotiations for heating OIL and beyond.

Whilst it is unique to bring an entire county together we have no intention of stopping there – this is the best news the UK family has had in a very long time and we have every intention of being inclusive, so we will roll it out across the UK very quickly.  To get your community, business or organisation involved and for more information email us: change@community-buying.com – join us on this incredible journey: a defining moment for communities in the UK.

Solar Update:  so you do want to own your own power station? Check out the next post below to see how Ana can help you get all the information you need to make all the right decisions. It is very very clever!

chris@community-buying.com

If only I still had that big van!

This is a skip outside our office. We’ve only been here two months and this is the first time I have seen this skip so rammed with carpets. They are not old. I assume they are off-cuts?

“Are they going for recycling?” I ask. “No mate landfill, there’s no way to recycle them!”

Two hundred metres down the road there’s a housing association. Across the road from there is a Car Boot sale every Sunday. Not much further away there is a dog sanctuary. I could go on and on of how they might get rid of these carpets – with a little bit of thought – and not have to pay for the landfill fee. Then of course there is www.carpet-recycling.com/ where guess what…yup you can arrange to have your carpets recycled.

There is always a solution if you just take a look from a different angle.

The Action Camp for Community Organisers is the inspirational event I knew it would be and I can’t wait to run my workshop tomorrow morning.

Locality (www.locality.org.uk) are a remarkable organisation that clearly influence huge positive impacts in communities – they have some 600 member organisations – and they major on three specific areas: community assets, community enterprise and social action. The Community Organisers concept has come from within Locality and it’s already been inspiring to be around so many people that care passionately for their own communities. This morning I was in an excellent session run by Kate Mellanby on the topic of “Know your Community Rights” (given I work with about 500 of them it seemed important to know all about their new rights about asset transfer and the right to BUY, BUILD and CHALLENGE) and the debate it created was fascinating. It further proved the synergy that exists between CBL and COs and I look forward to showing a packed workshop tomorrow morning in a session about the phenomenon that is Community Buying Groups. I have invited all attendees to bring their craziest ideas so we can work them up into micro ventures and each group can pitch their idea to a Dragon’s Den style panel.

Follow the event at #COCamp

chris@community-buying.com

One year ago today – the 14th July 2011 – was a day and date to remember…The Symposium!  It became so much bigger than we could have ever envisaged. This intro video will give you an idea of the flavour of the event (search YouTube for ”The Community Buying unLimited Symposium 14th July 2011″).

Even though some of what we thought we would be launching ourselves into did not quite turn out as planned – for reasons like the government’s feed-in-tariff turnaround – some of the outcomes have been “astonishing”!  Tim Smit was an inspirational speaker on the day and has become an inspirational friend since, and he often talks of the day he thought he might have committed himself to “car crash of an event” where he was concerned he would be with just “one man and a dog…but when I saw 160 excited people I thought to myself I’m in” as the moment that pushed him into beginning the concept he and Matt Hastings had been discussing for some time. That project is called Cornwall Together and is set to become a massive game changer in Community Buying Groups, as Ed Davey, Energy Secretary, comes down to Eden next week to kick off the launch! It has been an honour to be involved and we are proud to be part of something that will have such a profound impact

“The work you have put in to get Cornwall Together from an idea to a working product has been truly astonishing” Tim Smit

Look out for news following the launch on 23rd July 2012!

chris@community-buying.com

Oxfordshire Rural Community Council is such a great organisation to work with because the Chief Executive is a visionary. Linda Watson probably understands more about Group Buying than anyone at DECC, Consumer Focus, Which? and a bunch of other organisations that think they know all about Group Buying put together. Why…? Because together we have put in place the only Community Buying Group across the UK that is proven to actually work and along the way we found something that is magical!

When a group of people come together to buy something, anything, no matter if it is a community of five people or ten thousand it creates a tiny ripple of hope. It is a ripple that is growing fast and soon it will be a wave that will lap at the very foundation of old economic thinking and last century business models. Just watch and wonder in awe as the power of the group creates real change. For it is the Group that is the key. By becoming part of a group – actually joining something – the members become unified, their influence becomes magnified and the Trust they put in the group means that they then get involved in all the additional products and services that fellow members want to buy.

ORCC and CBL are relaunching the Solar Buying Group and we will buy huge amounts of solar for our members because they already part of an amazing group which they trust. It is this model that is going to drive our economy to low carbon outcomes quicker than anything else you can imagine:

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.” Goethe

Come and join the revolution.

chris@community-buying.com

If you run a heating OIL group and don’t receive emails like this:

“Thank you, for all you do. I have been hanging on waiting for such a moment to buy over the summer, and you have pulled it out of your hat for me. I’m so grateful. Best wishes. Anne”

then read on.

An OIL buying group that does not buy at least every month – except of course in December – is an OIL buying group that needs some rethinking. However, during the summer months, when in theory the heating is off and the stress to remember to constantly check the gauge is no longer an issue, the way to miximise savings for the group members is to make those buying days even more flexible. OIL buying group organisers must watch the market and when the time is right take every order they can to the market at the lowest possible moment. That moment just happened!

It is not too late to hang on to the coat tails of that optimum moment as the last two blog entries will explain. However, if you want to learn how to design your group to the point of that flexibility and, of even greater importance, you want access to the market intelligence that we have to help us make those choices, then please do get in touch.

For CBL this weekend is a defining moment in the battle of the consumer of rural energy taking on the corporation. It is a truly David versus Goliath situation and right now there has been only one winner – our membership! If you have members or you buy for your neighbours or even just your disabled Mum in rural Gloucestershire…don’t they have the right to know about how to access the lowest price for the most expensive commodity they have in their household budget? See the blog about Today’s HOTLINE.

The more we buy together the more we change life in rural areas.

chris@community-buying.com