Public procurement notice: Contract Notice
Published: 2020-09-18
Buyer: NHS Property Services Ltd
Country: UK
Contract type: Services
Procedure: Open procedure
CPV classification: 71314000: Energy and related services | 71314200: Energy management services
Submission deadline: 2020-10-15
Award criteria: The most economic tender

Technical requirements: The NHSPS estate is made up from a range of property types from large urban Community Hospitals down to small rural surgeries and where NHSPS is directly responsible for the provision of electricity and gas to about 1 600 of these properties. The utilities consumed on the estate are currently metered by over 3 000 electricity and gas meters, 1 500 water meters and very few, if any, heat meters.
There is typically a single electricity, gas and water meter for a property or a site, which may include more than one separate building or utilised space. There are some instances of larger sites with more than one fiscal meter, but these will rarely provide fiscal metering of each building, but with a more common arrangement seeing more than one building being served by a single fiscal meter. This arrangement makes determining the end-use of the utility, and ensuring accurate billing and tenant re-charging, difficult.
NHSPS now requires sub-metering to be assessed and installed across the estate in order to monitor utility consumption across all environmental utilities to support our environmental aims.
This project is being developed in order to procure a supplier or suppliers (depending on the capabilities of a single supplier to provide all required services) to provide expert guidance on the best way to meter our properties, install sub-meters to measure consumption of our relevant utilities and maintain these meters for the contracted term.
Initially, carry out a desk-top cost benefit analysis of the installation of electricity and gas sub-metering technology across our estate. This will determine which sites we can feasibly invest in sub-metering technologies, where an estimated benefit will provide a payback on investment that meets our requirements, or where there is deemed a mandatory requirement for sub-metering, and so provide a working list of sites to target and prioritise for the next phases of the project.
This is expected to be a relatively simple process to determine feasibility using property details, that will be provided at the time, to determine a suitable threshold where NHSPS could expect a return on investment on the cost of installing sub-meters.
An example of this assessment might be reviewing the relevant energy spend for a site, allocating an industry standard energy saving from utilising meter data and determining a threshold whereby properties below this would not be expected to achieve utility savings to cover the cost of the meters. We would encourage suppliers to suggest alternative solutions, based on knowledge and experience, but which would be simple to implement and complete.
The next phase will be to undertake a non-intrusive survey at some or all of the sites agreed on in phase 1, where NHSPS is responsible for the supply of the relevant utilities, and identify the most effective way to sub-meter these properties to meet our requirements for reporting, tenant re-charging and energy/carbon management.
The supplier will produce a succinct property metering report for each property that outlines the current electric and gas metering set up, recommended sub-metering (and Fiscal, if needed) solution and install cost that will ensure ongoing compliance, maximise the ability to meter end-use and space utility consumption, whilst minimising installation cost and disruption to the site activities and/or our customers.
• survey the location and condition of the existing utility metering/sub-metering at the property (electricity, gas), with pictures associated with these meters;
• an assessment of the existing sub-metering system or how a sub-metering system could be installed at the property to enable effective metering of the relevant utilities and spaces at the site (bearing in mind relevant mandatory requirements for each specific site, such as Heat Network Regulations, and other requirements such as tenant recharging);
• an assessment of the current, and/or recommendation to enable, Automated Meter Readings (AMR) at the site for remote reading of the meter and subsequent communication of this data;
• an assessment of, and/or the recommendation for, a communication methodology for the site to ensure consistent data transmission;
• a quote for the cost of the recommended actions (separate for each recommendation and a total for the property) to be incorporated into the report. The costs will be sourced from the agreed fees resulting from this tender process and on agreement with the successful supplier. Please refer to Schedule 3(a) — Pricing Template;
• an assessment of the most suitable funding method to procure the sub-meters and associated equipment. These methods may include, for example, initial Capital investment and/or leasing options. There should also be an option for tenants to procure additional sub-meters through the contract, should they want to add additional granularity to any sub-metering we may install.