load sharing

Hire qualified people that understand all of the engineering of your plant. Pay these people a generous salary because you appear to not even know what type of a plant you have. For all we know your plant maybe just a cotyledon going through a growth spurt that requires more energy than it can produce just to take root.

Electricity use ↑ = cost ↑

Electricity use ↓ = cost ↓

Turn off the lights.

Dear Guest, <load sharing> Sharing is a great concept ….... have you tried plugging into your neighbors meter for a while? See, there is always a good answer for every problem, some times it is hiding in plain sight. Next.

give all your employees a few 12 volt deep cycle batteries. Have them hook them up in their car to charge up every day on their way home and back to work each day. bring the batteries in, hook them up to a grid intertie inverter inspected and ok'd by your local utility company, and dump the charge back in to the grid.

put solar panels on the roof of your company and dump that into the grid, reducing your overall use.

slap thermoelectric energy harvesters onto any hot surface in your company, wire these together to produce electricity the same way as solar.

does the water line to your ice machine run through the attic, and down past the ice makers exhaust before it enters your icemaker.

just running the water line through the basement or crawlspace on its way to the icemaker will reduce its electric use, and produce more ice.

Switch all electrical loads off and see if you still take power from the grid.

Find the reason for that and fix it. (Maybe someone else is stealing your power as someone else suggested!!)

Switch only the things on what you need at the time.

Maybe you have some large inductive loads and the Power Factor is not good....What is your PF?

Capacitor banks can bring some correction and reduce power usage.

Get the other workers to follow the same policies with switching on and off what is needed.

Go to CFL, LED or Fluorescent lighting....

Please get energy audit done in your factory by qualified energy auditor he will suggest you to save electricity so that your bill amount is reduced.

This is very hard to answer without knowing the size and nature of your plant, how many shifts you operate, what kind of equipment you are running, and what changes if any have been made lately.

First thing is to either hire someone to do an audit or do one yourself. To do a simple audit yourself, walk through the plant during a non production time, such as a weekend or middle of the night and make a list of everything that is on. Find out why it is on and how to shut it off. Then, shut it off. Communicate to the supervisors that they are leaving equipment on and wasting money. Take light readings and see if your light levels are too high. If so, reduce the number of lights, but be careful about spacing so you don't mess up your uniformity. See if lights are being left on in empty offices, restrooms, locker rooms, storage areas, basements, attics, etc. Eliminate any incandescent lights. Use CFL for general lighting and LED for signage. Do you have conveyors that are left running with nothing on them? Do you have motors still running that could be turned off. Do you hear a lot of air leaks that will make your compressors run more. Do you have water leaks that are causing pumps to run, including your fire protection system. Make sure the air conditioning temperature is not set too low (76 is good) and that air conditioning is off when not needed. I don't know what kind of lighting you have now, but if you have metal halide, consider replacing it with T8 or T5 fluorescent. For every four 400 Watt MH I take out, I put in three 200 W T8 fluorescent with an occupancy sensor and reduce our lighting by 2/3. Do you have a cooling tower? Make sure it is not leaking and running the pump too much. Talk to the people on the production floor and ask them if they are doing anything different or if they notice and change in the way their equipment operates. If you post any more data, please be specific about the size and nature of your operations. Our peak demand is over 10 MW and if you are only a few hundred kW then your opportunities are less.

Most commercial building have a peak demand meter that base your billing on the highest demand of power. Something as simple as starting all of your equipment at the same time can increase your power bill due to the demand.

Points to look at: find out what your peak is and when it occurred

see if it occurred at morning start up---if so stagger your startup to keep down your demand.

As the point was made get rid of energy wasting lights, this could be as much as 10% of your power bill, if you can add skylights to your production area if it is not condition now.

Check that all mechanical equipment has been serviced and in working order.

also you might look at insulating your condition spaces.

I do know from personal experience that new lighting and controlling your power usage as close to your working hours will pay off.

I worked for 30 years for a very large electric uitilty company and 9 years in a major industrial facility. It is a very common misconception that motor start ups increase your demand. Most demand periods are 15 minutes long and a motor start lasts for seconds, or maybe a minute at worst. Staggering is helpful if the equipment has a long warm up time, like some sort of process heat. If that is the type of equipment, start up one, let it get up to temperature and cycle off, then start up the next one. It is a waste of time to try to control your demand by staggering motor starts. Knowing when your peak demand occurs is valuble because it can tip you off that something strange is happening or allow you to shift an operation to a different time to avoid a peak. Skylights can be helpful if they allow you to turn lights off. Wal Mart takes very good advantage of daylighting. However, if you have HID lighting they are going to stay on because of the long cool down and restrike time. Skylights are also good for a warehouse or some place where you don't go in often and rarely go in at night. You can go in without turning lights on most of the time.

What sort of tariff is being charged:

• per kWh?
• peak load kVA?
• etc.

In the states your peak demand( KW ) sets your rate for a year..summer peaks are often set at 110% of costs...winter rates may only be 80% of costs..this is used only for understanding how one can save using your peak demand.