E&C Consultants History

The drive to start a new energy consultancy

A wave of energy market deregulation raged through Europe at the beginning of the century. This created new challenges when buying energy. The need for a new type of energy procurement consulting for meeting these challenges was at the basis of E&Cs foundation in 2005. More specifically, the need for higher quality advice to deal with the main factor impacting open market energy costs: the volatility of the underlying wholesale markets.

We offered our clients advice on implementing risk management tools to minimize the impact and helped them to negotiate the newly created contracts that offered flexibility for fixing wholesale prices in different moments. Our unparalleled capacity for neutralizing the impact of energy cost variations on a company’s P&L has been the basis for our high client retention rate of 98%. Over the course of the years, we have finetuned the tools we use for putting our risk management strategies in practice. However, we’ve always kept applying the basic simple business logic on which it is based and which makes it so successful.

EC_History_2012

Rapid internationalization

E&C was started in Belgium by Belgians. With Belgium being such a small country, we rapidly ran into borders. In 2006, a client that we still work with today said, “great job here in Belgium, but we also have factories in France, UK, Germany and the Netherlands, could you do the same thing there?”. So, we did. And it was the start of a remarkable story of internationalization. After moving our headquarters to Kortrijk, we opened offices in Heerlen (the Netherlands), Frankfurt (Germany), Paris (France), Barcelona (Spain), London (UK) and Wroclaw (Poland). In 2014, international became transatlantic with the opening of our office in New York. This was highlighted in our successful TEC conferences where we informed clients on buying energy from and on both sides of the Atlantic. From 2016 onwards we also started to service more and more clients in Latin-America from our office in Madrid. And then in 2018, international became truly global with the opening of two new offices in Melbourne and Toronto. In 2021, we could proudly announce that the number of countries where we delivered services to clients had grown to 100.

Placing ourselves where we can make the biggest difference

The idea behind this strategy of internationalization was that it would give us the possibility of working for large users of energy. From our early years, we have always consciously steered away from the brokering work delivered to smaller users. We want to bring high quality, independent consulting services and these are most valuable to companies with a large energy spend. As we expanded our capabilities for doing this in more and more countries, we started to attract clients among the largest companies on this planet.

To bring such consultancy, it is important that it’s based on solid data. In 2008, we came into the market with a first version of our data management platform ePoint. This has evolved into a one-stop shop for all your energy procurement information across the globe.

1637146499007Picture taken in Mallorca, Spain, in October 2021, on the occasion of an E&C Consultants team building

And now there is the energy transition. Probably the biggest transformational process that we’ll go through in our lifetimes. A process that creates new needs in terms of strategies, contract negotiations, risk management and data management. With its in-depth knowledge of energy markets and it’s unparalleled independence, E&C has an excellent position to help you realize even the most ambitious decarbonization goals without excessive risk taking. In an energy services sector where commissions on big PPA contracts are seriously blurring the advice clients can get, E&C has become a safe haven for high quality, objective advice on renewable energy options; leading every week to new realizations in terms of green energy with clients; helping us to deliver on our promise of “Smarter energy for a better world”.

Risk management, internationalization, working for the largest users and energy transition: the chapters in the book of E&C which we’ll keep writing together with our fantastic people and clients!

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