Recently in conducting our corporate energy assessments, we’ve come across more frequent situations where our customers are incurring high demand charges from their utilities. In most cases they haven’t known the relative size of these charges, nor that they can often be reduced or even avoided.
As we dig in, studying interval data from their utility bills and correlating usage with their operations, we typically discover that large loads (ventilation, chillers, machinery) can be time shifted an hour or two with limited impact to the overall business. Depending on the size of the load, time of day and the utility’s demand charge rate, this can have huge dollar savings impact.
Sitting down with management to review our findings is even more revealing – the simple question, “could we change this process without an effect?” often renders an “of course, we’ve just always run it that way.” In which case the team leaves our meeting feeling pretty positive (which of course we like a lot.)
So to capture these demand charge reduction savings there are two basic approaches:
1. make the process modification today and begin periodic analysis of your demand charge going forward (no cost)
2. install a control system which provides demand control scheduling (low cost)
Obviously some situations are more complex than others, but either way there are $ savings to be had and most times this comes without huge pain. If you’re interested, here is a more detailed write up to study.
