Your business requires a lot of energy. From running lights and computers to powering heavy machinery, it’s very easy for your energy costs to balloon out of control.
On any given day, your energy charges will be more expensive during peak hours, while the same amount of energy will cost less at a different time of day.
To help save money, many businesses are turning to peak shaving to help them control energy costs while maintaining their business operations.
Read on to learn more about what peak shaving is and how it can impact your business’ bottom line:
What Is Peak Shaving?
Peak shaving is the practice of leveling out the peak use of electricity by individual consumers.
In many cases, one of the primary reasons a business chooses to use peak shaving is to help reduce costs on their energy bills.
Your energy provider tracks your power consumption at fixed time intervals, measuring how much energy is used and at what rate. When looking at your power bill, you may see that it’s composed of two parts:
- Energy consumption: These are the primary energy charges for the total amount of electricity you’ve used throughout the billing period, measured in kilowatt hours, or kWh.
- Demand charges: These charges measure the rate at which you consume energy, especially during hours where power is at high demand. The more power you consume during peak hours, the higher your energy bill is.
In other words, peak shaving is the process of reducing the amount of energy your business uses during hours of peak energy demand. Reducing this number helps to reduce the peak demand charges and, overall, save money.
Some ways that businesses may implement peak shaving include:
- Temporarily scaling down production or operations
- Activating an on-site power generation system
- Utilize energy shifting
- Relying on battery power
How Peak Shaving Impacts Energy Usage
Regardless of the method you choose for peak shaving, decreasing the amount of peak demand energy you consume is going to decrease your overall bill.
While some methods, such as using on-site power generation or implementing solar storage batteries, will cost you money upfront, the savings in energy will eventually pay for the cost of these items.
Additionally, any time you are decreasing your business’ usage of energy or switching to renewable sources of energy, you’re reducing your impact on carbon emissions. Even if you only implement peak shaving methods for an hour per day, every day, that’s 260 hours of energy you’re saving, assuming your business is operational five days per week.
Bottom line: Any amount of peak shaving you do is going to be helpful to both your business’ energy budget and your impact on the environment.
Energy Auditing Software for Business
At EMAT, we want to make it easier and less frustrating for you to understand how much energy your business is using and find ways to reduce those numbers. With Field Auditor, you can take measurements, snap pictures, and make notes out in the field, saving you time and hassle over traditional methods of energy auditing. Schedule your demo today!