ESOS portal opens for compliance submissions 

Environment Agency’s online portal is now open for notification of compliance submissions ahead of ESOS Phase 3 deadline of 5 June 2024. 

First, what is ESOS? 

Introduced in 2014, the Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme (ESOS) requires qualifying UK organisations, mostly large businesses, to carry out an ESOS audit of the energy use in their buildings, industrial processes and transport.  

An ESOS assessment results in a report on the energy conservation measures the organisation can take, which must be signed off by a board member. 

Once the participating organisation has undertaken an ESOS energy assessment and is compliant with their obligations, they must submit a notification of compliance to the Environment Agency. 

The scheme is currently in its third compliance period, known as ESOS Phase 3. After completing their assessment, participants must submit their notification of compliance via Environment Agency’s Manage your Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme (MESOS) by 5 June 2024. 

What do I need to know?

In an April 2024 update to the ESOS UK guidance, the Environment Agency announced that you should aim to meet the official compliance notification deadline but if this isn’t possible, the Environment Agency and devolved administration regulators will not take enforcement action if you meet both these deadlines: 

• you register your account in the MESOS system by 5 June 2024. 
• you submit your notification of compliance by 6 August 2024. 

Despite this updated ESOS guidance, eligible organisations should still treat their Phase 3 compliance submission as an immediate priority.

What lies ahead?

Although Phase 3 compliance submissions is an immediate priority for qualifying organisations, we must already consider ESOS Phase 4. 

Unlike previous ESOS reporting phases which featured one compliance submission every four years, you will now need to comply with annual submissions to the Environment Agency.  

You will now need to define an Action Plan and report on your progress against it in subsequent years. The deadline for the Action Plan is 5 December 2024. 

How can Inspired help?

Inspired has participated in the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) of the MESOS portal, which has allowed us to benefit from:  

• Early access to the portal functionality – allowing us to refine our reporting templates.  
• Identifying system issues – minimising deployment errors and improving the user experience. 
• Feeding back observations and recommendations – in the interest of all users. 

Participating in weekly development sessions has kept us informed of system development and allowed us to lobby our viewpoints in the best interest of our clients’ future compliance obligations.

Further UAT is still required to support the deployment of more updates to the portal. This will assist with the Action Plan and Annual Progress Updates.

As Action Plans are a new feature of the ESOS scheme, completing and uploading your first Action Plan can be bewildering. Our involvement with upcoming portal testing further ensures we will have a strong understanding of what our clients can expect.