Case studies
Real facilities. Real load profiles. The math shown.
Every engagement below started with a utility bill, an interval-data export, and a walk of the plant floor. What follows is the kind of work we do for large commercial and industrial sites — the levers we pull, and the ranges of result those levers actually produce.
Representative engagements
Four kinds of facility, four different levers
These are the engagement types we run most often for C&I clients — described here as representative work, not a single named site's exact figures.
Food processing — peak shaving
Cutting the demand spike, not the output
A food-processing plant's demand charge is usually set by a 15-minute window — compressors, chillers, and a batch of ovens all firing at once. We map the interval data against the utility's demand-rate structure, then stage battery discharge or curtailable loads to shave that window without slowing the line. Third-party research from NREL and DOE puts well-designed peak-shaving programs in the 15–40% demand-reduction range for this profile, and the demand charge — not the energy charge — is usually where the bill relief shows up first.
Distribution warehouse — power quality & audit
The bill goes up before it goes down
Warehouses running conveyor drives, dock levelers, and refrigeration units often carry a poor power factor that utilities penalize directly. Our audit starts on the panel — harmonics, imbalance, power factor — and usually turns up correctable losses before any capital project is proposed. Correcting power factor and rebalancing feeder loads is typically the cheapest lever in the entire portfolio, and it's the one most facilities have never had measured.
Manufacturing campus — on-site generation
Building a second source of supply
For a multi-building manufacturing campus, resilience matters as much as cost. We size on-site generation — gas-fired units, sometimes paired with battery storage — against the campus's critical loads, then model the economics under time-of-use and demand-response tariffs. Done right, the generation asset earns its keep two ways: it shaves demand during normal operation and it keeps the lines running when the grid doesn't.
Cold storage — demand response enrollment
Getting paid to shift load you already control
Cold storage facilities carry huge, deferrable thermal mass — a compressor cycle can shift by an hour without anyone noticing. We build a demand-response strategy around that flexibility, enroll the facility in the utility's or ISO's program, and set the control logic so curtailment events happen automatically. The facility earns a capacity or event payment for load it was never using efficiently in the first place.
Track record
Numbers we can stand behind
Our experience spans many years and numerous clients.
In their words
What plant managers tell us after the fact
The engagements above, described by the people who lived through them.
On-site generation gave us predictability we never had. We finally control our exposure to peak pricing instead of just reacting to the bill.
A hundred years of experience in the room and none of the fluff. They benchmarked us, found the waste, and reported it in terms our CFO could act on.
Send us your load profile. We'll run the math.
No obligation, no boilerplate proposal — just a real read on where your demand charges, power factor, and generation options stand today, and what a project like the ones above would actually be worth on your meter.
Keep reading
More on how these numbers get made
Deeper explainers on demand charges, power quality, and program design from our Energy Insights library, plus a full breakdown of our Energy Solutions and the team behind them.