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Demand And Your Building’s Energy Bill

ADMS-Blog

Today, demand accounts for 40-75% of monthly energy bill.

With recent technology such as the building of automation systems and open programming, allows for our proprietary software to help buildings optimize their energy usage.

Our Process

“Smart Solar” (solar power linked to automation) is the backbone of our ADMS package. We carefully engineer a solar array based on measured daily load profiles, and current/future energy load estimates.

This array drives down the baseline demand of the building at peak times, while our constantly “thinking” automation controls evaluate changing conditions, monitor the solar output, and reduce usage spikes.

This dual attack of demand is what makes our solutions unique to the industry and valuable to the end user.

Peak Demand Driving High Costs

Many businesses don’t use much energy all the time, but when a thermostat’s mercury spikes, demand soars.

Recent analysis of the electricity bill data of several major retailers and telecom companies reveals a pervasive trait: just 4% of their total energy use drives about 40% of their total peak demand. Essentially, a tiny amount of energy use, occurring at the peak hours and largely driven by air conditioning, requires a lot capacity that isn’t needed during the other hours of the year.

Many common loads, including typical A/C units, motors, pumps, charging stations, heaters , and others, often happen to turn on at the same time, creating coincidental energy peaks. This increase costs for the utility, which must have available capacity to meet these peaks.

Utilities typically impose “demand charges” on commercial and industrial customers, meaning that the customer pays each month for the maximum power demand at their meter during any given interval.

 

These charges, combined with the “peakness” of typical commercial loads, mean that only 4% of a business’s energy use drives 40% of the monthly demand charges a business must pay. With typical demand charges of $5-15 per peak kW per month, this peak energy can drive additional costs on the order of thousands of dollars per building per year.

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