When a customer says “you guys are real bandits, you know that?” and it’s meant as a compliment, you know times have changed. Welcome to the new reality of the energy market.
This happened during an energy audit. There was a lot of potential for saving for this company: some savings would require investment, some was pretty low-hanging fruit. Nonetheless, there was clearly enough savings to be found that some of it could be channeled into an investment in a bit of rooftop solar. A small system, just enough to take the edge off of daily demand, but a good start.
Of course, the Obama administration helped. The solar incentives included in the new stimulus package give businesses a number of options for bringing down and/or recouping parts of the installation costs for solar systems. For small-scale systems, this is a good time for solar incentives. They don’t pay for everything, but again, they take a substantial bite out of the upfront cost.
(There’s more to the current plan than just solar, by the way. We’ll be looking at some of the changes in more detail in the weeks to come.)
Here’s the thing: once the system is in place, he’ll start saving from the get-go. One of the benefits of solar panels is that they generate at highest efficiency during the time of highest, and most costly, electric demand: mid-day. So they give him a way to not just reduce overall demand, but to trim peaks off his load profile. It won’t meet all his demand, not even close, but the savings will be real. And we recommended he take these future savings as they come and put them right back into some of the more impactful efficiency updates.
This was what he meant by us being bandits: we steal a bit from here and a bit from there, put it into something else, then steal what savings that gives us and use it somewhere else again. Keep being opportunistic. Keep grabbing those dollars where they appear and putting them into use creating more savings opportunities. The end result: something which had previously seemed out of reach, a few kW of solar on his roof, suddenly became doable.
This is how a lot of Cost Containment customers are going to find their way into the green energy movement: by thinking like bandits. Pirates, if you like…pirates are usually the heroes in the movies. Rather than looking for the big, one-stop solution, you steal a bit here, steal a bit there, and chip an unreasonable expense down to a reasonable one. Then jump aboard. Parrot optional.
A bit of efficiency. A bit of saving from better procedures. A tax break from the government. A bit of accelerated depreciation. A bit of incentive from the state. A bit of future savings. It all adds up to a whole new solution.