Demand control by building type

The best candidates are the spikiest buildings

There is a single number that tells you whether a commercial building is worth evaluating, and it is called load factor. Divide your monthly kWh by your peak kW times 24 hours times the days in the billing period. The result is the fraction of your capacity you actually used.

A building at 10 to 30 percent load factor spikes hard and sits idle most of the time. It is paying for capacity it uses for a few hours a week. That building has a lot to gain.

A building at 60 percent or more runs steadily all day with no meaningful peaks. A 24-hour convenience store is the standard example. There is nothing to flatten, because the curve is already flat. We will tell you that rather than sell you something.

Bill Brayden, who invented the system in 1978 and has evaluated commercial sites for nearly fifty years, puts it bluntly: a 20 percent load factor is a home run. Above 50 or 60 percent, walk away.

The five building types below tend to fall on the good side of that line for structural reasons having to do with how they are occupied. That does not mean every one of them qualifies. It means they are worth the twenty minutes it takes to check.

How the evaluation works

Every commercial project follows the same three steps before anyone quotes a price.

Interval data review. Your utility has your demand data in 15, 30 or 60 minute intervals, and most utilities will provide 12 months of it on request. This is the single most useful document in the process. It shows exactly when your peaks occur, how high they go, how often they repeat, and whether they are driven by weather, schedule or a single piece of equipment. It also produces your load factor.

Tariff analysis. We read your actual rate schedule, not a summary of it. What is the demand charge per kW. Is demand measured 24/7 or only during on-peak hours. Is there a ratchet clause. Is there a rate class threshold you are sitting just above. Sometimes the best answer for a small commercial account is not savings at all, it is staying below a threshold so you never get moved to a more expensive rate class.

Site inspection. Somebody walks the building. Where is the main distribution panel, what is the service configuration, what loads exist, how are they wired, where can control points go, and can power line carrier reach them. Commercial equipment lists are built from scratch for each site, and that list determines the price. The engineering happens before the quote, not after.

If the numbers do not work, we say so at step one or two, before anyone spends money.