How We Work: From Plant Assessment to Live Operation
The diagram below is the full pathway, not just the study. Whatever the objective — Demand Response, Tariff Optimisation, or Alternate Tariffs — the first step is always the same: assess your plant and build a validated simulation model of it. The diagram then runs through four phases, Data Gathering and Model Configure, Analyse using Simulation Model, Implementation – Control and Contract, and Live Operation and Ongoing Review, with an approval decision between the analysis and the implementation, and shows where a systems integrator and your electricity retailer come into the process alongside Delprosa and you as the client.
The plant assessment and simulation model are the same first step regardless of objective. The difference is what the model is then evaluated against: wholesale spot price exposure, your current retail tariff, or the alternative retail offers on the table. The business case, approval, implementation, and live operation phases are shared across all three.
Phase 1: Data Gathering and Model Configure
This is the part we do independently, using your plant data and real market pricing, before any capital or operational commitment is made. It is identical for all three services.
- Assess plant operations, constraints, and retail tariff. Establish the real constraints on your pumps, blowers, and any storage or generation assets, so the model reflects what your plant can actually do, and understand your current tariff and contract position, since the value of any change depends partly on what you are moving away from.
- Build and validate the model. Set up a simulation engine specific to your plant configuration, then check it against your actual plant data before it is used for anything decision grade.
Phase 2: Analyse using Simulation Model
With the model built and validated, the objective determines what is evaluated against it. There are three routes, and they can be combined where a plant’s circumstances support it:
- Demand Response. Run the model against wholesale spot price exposure, with sensitivity analysis across a range of price outcomes, to quantify what moving load onto the spot market is worth, reflecting real volatility rather than a single scenario.
- Tariff Optimisation. Run the model against your current retail tariff, with sensitivity analysis, to find the operational changes that reduce cost within the contract you already hold, including maximum demand charge management, without changing your risk position.
- Alternate Tariffs. Run your historical load through each proposed retail offer, including demand charges, time of use rates, and network charges, to compare offers on realistic operating outcomes rather than headline rates.
Whichever route applies, the outcome is the same: a transparent, plant-specific forecast of what will actually happen to your electricity bill, and across the operation as a whole, before you commit to a change.
Business Case and Approval to Implement
The scenarios come together into a business case quantifying the saving, its sensitivity, and the case for any further investment. Where relevant, alternate plant configurations are tested, such as whether additional storage or digestion capacity would be justified once the energy value is properly accounted for.
The business case is built to be put in front of your board or governance body as it stands, and the decision is entirely yours. If the numbers do not support proceeding, the business case has still been answered and no further spend is made. If they do, the decision is to proceed to implementation.
Phase 3: Implementation – Control and Contract
Implementation runs one of two tracks, depending on the service, and they can run in parallel where a business case covers both control and contract change.
Control scheme implementation (Demand Response, Tariff Optimisation). If you decide to proceed with a control change, implementation can run one of two ways. We can project manage the SCADA and control integration on your behalf, working directly with a systems integrator through to commissioning, so the delivered system matches what was modelled rather than a simplified version of it. Or your organisation can manage that phase internally with your own delivery team, using the business case and control logic from the earlier phases as the brief. Either way, the integrator builds the control logic into your SCADA systems, reflecting the constraints and logic validated in the simulation.
Contract implementation (Alternate Tariffs). A contract change is a commercial arrangement between your organisation and your electricity retailer directly. Delprosa is not party to that agreement and does not negotiate on your behalf, but we facilitate the conversation and help you understand what to ask for, based on what the business case shows is actually worth pursuing. That facilitation covers assessing the options your retailer puts forward in response, re-running the same model against revised offers so you can compare what each is actually worth before signing, and supporting your own negotiation or procurement process with a quantified basis for the conversation.
Phase 4: Live Operation and Ongoing Review
Demand Response and Tariff Optimisation. Once commissioned, your plant runs under price responsive control. The forecast driven logic developed during the earlier phases is what actually drives control day to day, responding to price the same way it did in the simulation, because it is built on the same model. The result is lower electricity cost and lower net emissions, sustained as an ongoing operating outcome rather than a one off saving, with your operators retaining manual override at all times.
Alternate Tariffs. Once the new contract is in place, your site is billed under the optimised structure. The cost model becomes the ongoing reference point for that arrangement, and a tariff arrangement is not set and forget. Retailers and network operators continue to adjust structures over time, and the model keeps that under review, so the arrangement stays competitive rather than quietly going stale.
Monitoring and Ongoing Value
A commissioned control scheme or an optimised tariff is not set and forget. Market conditions, tariff structures, and plant conditions all change over time, and an arrangement validated at commissioning can lose accuracy and value quietly, without anyone noticing until the savings have already gone.
Delprosa offers an ongoing service to keep the arrangement performing as intended, covering:
- Measurement and verification — periodic reporting comparing actual electricity cost against a defined baseline, giving a clear, evidence based figure for savings delivered.
- Forecasting model recalibration — keeping the scheduling logic accurate as NEM price behaviour shifts over time.
- Control scheme health checks — confirming the scheme is still respecting its process constraints as reservoir capacity, inflow patterns, or asset condition change.
- Tariff and market reviews — checking the cost model against current network and retail charges, and flagging upcoming regulatory changes.
- Annual business case refresh — revisiting the original case with actual performance data, and identifying whether the scope should expand.
Together, these keep a scheme accurate, safe, and demonstrably valuable well beyond the point of implementation.
A different commercial model, and a different starting point
Most electricity advisers in this space work on a revenue share basis, taking a cut of the savings or market payments a client’s flexible load generates, or sell a particular retailer’s product. Those models work once a scheme is running or a contract is signed, but they say nothing about how the savings were arrived at or how the risk to the process was assessed beforehand, and both create an interest in the answer before the numbers are run.
Delprosa works differently. Engagement is on a consultancy fee basis, for developing the business case and quantifying the likely savings before any control scheme is built or any contract is changed, and for project managing implementation afterwards if that is the direction a client wants to take. There is no revenue share, no commission from any retailer, and no ongoing cut of savings. The commercial interest in overstating the opportunity is removed.
That distinction matters because of what sits behind the numbers. An electricity adviser can build a control layer around plant equipment or a tariff comparison from a rate card, but without a background in the design and operation of treatment plants, has no reliable basis for judging what shifting operating parameters will do to plant operational stability and effluent quality, or what knock on effects it might create downstream. Without that understanding, the savings case is a guess dressed up as an estimate, and the risk of destabilising the process is not something the provider is equipped to assess, let alone manage.
Delprosa’s work starts from the plant, not the market. Reservoir operating windows, treatment performance constraints, and pump and asset condition are used to establish what can safely be deferred and by how much, before any savings figure is put in front of a client. The result is a business case built on process understanding rather than one built backwards from a target savings percentage.
Where to start
Every plant is different, and the diagram above only means something once it is applied to your actual pumps, blowers, and digestion or generation assets, and the tariff or offers actually on the table. The first step is the plant assessment, which tells us quickly whether there is a case worth building, and which of the three routes fits your circumstances.
Explore Energy Management -> Contact us to scope an assessment for your plant ->