5 Steps To Lower Your Business’ Electric Bill

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These easy steps will help small businesses improve their bottom line through electric bill reductions

Electric bills are going higher. Your business must act now because the utilities in over a dozen states are projecting 5-15% annual electricity price increases.  Only five states have utilities that do not project higher prices in the coming year. This article profiles five steps you must take to control your electricity costs.

Why your electric bill continues to go higher

Electricity produced by your local utility is doomed to cost you more. The technologies used by the electricity industry are defined by their increasing costs. Power plants cost more to build, repair and maintain. Long-term fuel costs to run a power plant are going up just like our pump prices. Utilities face massive cost investments to protect grid reliability and security. It you do not act then your business is doomed to pay more to your local electric utility. Just a five percent annual increase in utility prices means your utility bill will be 20% higher in just four years!

Here are the 5 steps to lower electric bill:

The good news is that there are best practices available to every business that can reduce what you pay the electric utility. Reducing your electric bill is now one of the easiest, fastest and most proven ways to increasing your profits.

Here are five proven ways to increase your profits by reducing your electric bills:

1. Hire a utility rate audit expert

Is there anything more complicated than electric rate designs? But there is gold locked inside an electric utilityÂ’s clumsy and complicated rates. In almost every electric utility jurisdiction there are rate analysts that your business can hire to audit your bills and give you concrete ways for reducing your businessÂ’ electric bills. Many of these rate analysts will work for a share of actual electric bill savings.

A best practice in choosing a rate analysis is to look for one that used to work in the rate department for your local utility. Another is to get three referrals of businesses like yours where the rate analyst has saved money for these businesses by reducing their electric bills. A third best practice is call your local electric utility. A growing number of them offer free bill audits and onsite energy analysis to help you find ways to reduce your electric bills. This is a first step every business must do if you are serious about reducing your electricity costs.

2. Install LED lights

Installing LED lights is absolutely the best investment you can make in your business. LED lights typically pay for themselves in six to twenty-four months after installation. (A six month payback period means you are earning a 200% annual return on investment!)

LED lights use about a tenth of the electricity that the old Edison bulbs consume. Unlike those old Edison bulbs a LED light bulb does not generate heat. Why is that important? Would you turn on a heater in the middle of summer?

In fact you are turning on a heater when you turn on an old Edison bulb. So you are paying higher electric bills to keep your customers and employees conformable by running the A/C harder to overcome the heat generated from old Edison bulbs. Finally, LED light bulbs last and last and last. This reduces your labor costs. Call three lighting contractors and get bids on converting your business to LED lighting and begin earning up to 200% annual return on your money.

3. Green teams

A green team  is a self-directed group of work associates focused upon trying to figure out how to reduce a company’s environmental footprint. How does that reduce electric bills? Businesses that I have worked with that have started green teams report that reducing waste streams and emissions also reduces costs. As a manager or business owner how often do you ask your work associates to be more focused upon costs? Yet this focus is typically not motivating unless there is a financial crisis that looks like it could impact a work associate’s job or pay.

But the miracle of green teams is that people are highly motivated to find ways to improve human health, including the health of the environment. This is especially strong among the millennial generation and their moms who I call Concerned Caregivers because of their focus upon the wellness of their loved ones. Engaging these work associates in green teams is a proven best practice for identifying and implementing sustainable changes in processes and behaviors that will reduce your electric bill along with many other costs incurred in your business that have a waste stream or create emissions.

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