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December 2005 — Vol. 83, No. 10

Take advantage of energy efficiency rebates, incentives

New incentives, including for natural gas, coming next year

 

The state’s major electric utilities are required by law to provide customers with energy efficiency rebates and incentives. These are funded by a 3-mil conservation charge on customers’ electric bills that goes into the state’s Energy Efficiency (formerly Energy Conservation and Load Management) Fund. Another 1 mil from each electric bill goes into the Clean Energy Fund.

In essence, that means you have already paid for these energy services. You might as well use them.

Services offered by Connecticut Light & Power and United Illuminating include rebates for lighting, motors and HVAC systems, and incentives for things such as energy audits, studies of specific electrical equipment, process re-engineering for increased manufacturing efficiency, operation and maintenance efficiency, new construction, major renovations, and other types of projects.

“The single best program the utilities offer,” according to Chris Halpin, president of Celtic Energy Inc. in Glastonbury, is the Small Business Energy Advantage program.

“It’s for companies with annual peak demand of between 10 and 200 kilowatts. It’s mostly for lighting, some control equipment, refrigeration equipment. Approved vendors do a free energy audit and recommend energy-saving equipment. The utility will pay up to 50% of the cost of the products, including installation. They also offer an incentive to implement the project, and if you’re a good credit risk, you get a 0% loan for up to 30 months for the balance of the cost,” he says.

“Most of these projects have paybacks of two years or less; that’s a 50% return on your investment — and you don’t even have to put up any of your own money up front. I don’t know anywhere a business can make an investment and get a 50% return.”

For more about these programs, contact CL&P at 1-877-602-SAVE or www.cl-p.com, or UI at 1-877-947-3873 or www.uinet.com.

Municipal-owned electric utilities offer help too

If your facility is located in one of the nine municipalities not served by CL&P or UI, contact your local utility to see what services it offers. These utilities work with their large commercial and industrial customers on upgrading lighting, and share in the costs of energy audits and making processes more energy efficient, according to Maurice Scully, executive director of the Connecticut Municipal Electric Energy Cooperative (CMEEC).

“After the first of the year, they will have more-formalized programs consistent with what CL&P and UI offer,” he says. That’s one requirement of the Energy Independence Act.

“We also work with customers on emergency generation through ISO New England’s load-response program. This can offset customers’ energy costs. ... The local utility would handle everything needed to set up that program,” Scully says.

Gas utilities willing to work with you

The natural-gas utilities also don’t have formalized energy efficiency programs for commercial and industrial customers. But Yankee Gas, Connecticut Natural Gas and Southern Connecticut Gas work with individual customers to help them use gas more efficiently or otherwise keep their costs down — for example, through an interruptible-supply agreement. Contact your utility company to see how they can help you.

More energy efficiencyprograms coming next year

Sometime in 2006, CL&P and UI will begin providing additional incentives for conservation, load management and distributed generation, as called for by the state’s new Energy Independence Act.

That law also requires the municipal-owned electric utilities and the natural-gas utilities to work with the state’s energy efficiency advisory board on developing programs for their customers.

“The Department of Public Utility Control (DPUC) is now trying to determine how the new programs will work,” says CBIA Assistant Counsel Rob Earley, who recently chaired the advisory board.

Earley notes one ironic development: While the law creates new energy-efficiency ser-vices, the fund used to pay for those services has less money this year than last. “Legislators diverted some money from the fund to deal with the state’s budget problems. Full funding of the Energy Efficiency Fund would be $90 million; this year we only have $70 million.”

If you have any questions about energy policy in the state, call Earley at 860-244-1900.

 

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