[BC] Electricity peak shaving

[Chris Gebhardt]

Dana Puopolo wrote:
>Since your power draw is pretty constant, you might consider talking to the
>power company about demand billing. This might save you some money on your
>bill. Also, if you have a generator, many utilities offer a substantial
>discount to users who are willing to go offline under brownout conditions. You
>probably could trade out an electrical start generator for your 1 kW BE-a 5-7
>KW should be plenty, even to run the basics at your studio.

I thought I would touch on what Dana mentioned here regarding credits from the utility company, based on what we have learned through our experience.

What Dana referred to is called a Demand/Response program, or peak shaving.  It is my experience that the power company itself isn't interested in talking to you about participating unless you're swinging at least a megawatt.

We're pulling about 150kW on our primary meter and about 75kW on our secondary. (Being mission critical, we pull 2 utility feeders, each on independent transformer banks.)   We found a demand-response aggregator called EnerNoc.  They'll deal with loads as small as 100kW.

They install some hardware that will interface with your ATS which is controlled by software by their technicians.  In addition, they install pulse boards in the meters.  Their equipment is connected via IP, which gives us the ability to see at a glance what our consumption is, as well as graph it out to see our demand and baseline in a historical timeline.  Or we can export the data and put it in a spreadsheet... whatever. This comes in very handy when you get an exceptionally large bill and you are able to display your demand has been flat.

If the utility grid operator calls an event, they call EnerNOC.  EnerNOC in turn initiates calls/emails/pages to our contact list and tells us that we'll be going to generator in 15 minutes, press 1 to approve, 2 to decline.  Simultaneously, orange strobes in our control room will start to flash, indicating a pending event.

If we accept the event, our ATS will automatically fire up the generator and transfer our load off the grid until either (a) the utility operator calls an end to the event or (b) the peak-shave window expires.

Contractually, we cannot be called on for more than 8 hours of off-grid semi-annually.

We get an unscheduled test event annually which lasts for 15 minutes to verify our readiness.

For a small broadcaster or business, I would imagine this is probably beyond the scope of the installed infrastructure.  Unless you've got generator with remote-start capability, this isn't going to be an option.  And of course, you have to be consuming a minimum amount of electricity to make it worthwhile for the aggregator to pick you up.

Once every quarter, we are re-assessed for the load we draw.  We are compensated quarterly based on the previous quarter's load.  EnerNoc gets a big check from the utility company based on all of the load that they control, takes their 50% cut, then issues a check to us for the remaining 50%.

Yes, we "only" get 50%, but that's 100% more than what we would be eligible for if we walked up to the grid operator and said we wanted to be in their demand/response program.  Also, it's worth noting that EnerNoc pays for the entire installation, including equipment, labor, and if necessary your ATS/generator vendor to assist with integration.

For us, it has worked out to be a good deal.  If you've got the facilities and the power consumption, I'd certainly recommend giving it a look.

Chris Gebhardt
VIRTBIZ Internet Services
chris at virtbiz.com | (972) 485-4125