Last week we had our year-end team meeting, reviewing 2013 and discussing our draft 2014 business plans. We brainstormed about energy efficiency market trends and came up with three things to watch for in 2014 – one economic, one application and one fun, futuristic idea.
Topics: Energy Cost
As this heat bubble hovers over New England many folks are heading home on a Friday night to turn on two things – the Red Sox and their air conditioners.
Topics: heat wave, Energy Cost, residential air conditioner use
Like a trendy social networking term, fracking has entered everyday conversation. For the sake of the US economy we should all hope the trend is not fleeting….
Topics: Energy Cost, Fracking, fracking impact on energy prices, spark spread
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.
Topics: Energy Cost, Demand charges, Time shifting energy use, Demand Charge Reduction, real time electricity pricing
Recently a customer had us model the energy production and financial return for a new 2MW cogen system at their manufacturing site in the United Kingdom.
Our analysis considered their contract cost for kWh and natural gas, the system’s energy production in kWh and therms, its full installation and annual maintenance cost and their UK tax benefits, including a reduced carbon tax from the UK’s Carbon Reduction Commitment. All in, the capital investment had a simple payback of 2.3 years.
When we built the system’s 10 year PPA model there was one big question – what escalation rate for kWh and gas should we use?
Topics: escalation rate, cost of electricity, PPA, Solar PV, escalator, United Kingdom - carbon tax, energy contracts, Combined Heat & Power, Power Purchase Agreement, Energy Cost
