The Smart Growth Blog

How you can help manage your energy costs while keeping your grid stable

Written by Geoff Brown | Jan 19, 2023

In this episode of FAQ with AGIQ, we're going to talk about how you can be a little bit smarter with your local grid and your overall energy consumption.


Episode Transcription:

In today's FAQ with AGIQ, we're going to talk about how you can be a little bit smarter with your local grid and your overall energy consumption. One of the aspects that's pretty typical in a lot of facilities is a sunrise and sunset that's happening in a very sudden way. What this leads to is a sudden spike in demand.

You've got all of your lights turning on at the same time. You've got your HVAC system all kicking on at the same time. Sometimes across all of your rooms at the same time. And this leads to a huge increase in power demand for your building and for the local grid generally. And that can lead to unstable power or dirty power, things like nuisance tripping on breakers.

All of this is pretty common and it's very expensive to do. Many facilities are being build electricity or part of their electrical billing is on a demand basis. So, if you're able to reduce your demand number, the raw kilowatts of raw power going into your building, you've got the capacity to manage some of your electrical costs in a really easy way.

One of the ways that is absolutely worth looking into is staggering your rooms. If you've got eight flower rooms, there's absolutely nothing that requires all of those lights to turn on at 7 a.m. and all of them to turn off at 7 p.m.. You can have those rooms turn on in a staggered way every 10 minutes or so and have virtually no impact on your staffing requirements. In fact, it may make your staffing requirements easier because you're able to get your first feedings into those rooms in a staggered way and you're able to check those rooms shortly after lights on in a staggered way. You don't need to do it all at the same time. The 10 minutes after lights on happens eight times, not once that you have to deploy people to.

So, there's a lot of really good reasons to stagger it. Not the least of which is managing your costs, managing your employees in a more efficient way, and having a facility that, again, is just more stable. Obviously, grid power is a problem across the board and this is a way that you can help mitigate some of that and help prevent problems in your facility.

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