Sometimes, it can seem impossible to save on electricity during the cold winter months. Winter is fast approaching and both small and medium-sized businesses may be concerned about what their electricity and heating bills will look like over the coming winter months.
With that said, there are ways to mitigate increases in your business’s electricity costs, even without cheap electricity rates.
Compared to last winter, this coming winter is expected to be colder from the eastern Prairies to Quebec. The reality is that businesses in Ontario, and much of Canada, should prepare for a cold winter and understand how to conserve electricity, as well as know how to mitigate against volatile electricity prices. This is knowledge that can help a company’s energy management strategy not only during a cold winter, but throughout the year.
Something as simple as setting your office’s thermostat lower can help energy costs, and leaving it at that lower point with a programmable thermostat can help even the most forgetful energy consumers. Installing dimmer switches in one’s office is also recommended, as well as unplugging electronics when they’re not in use (or using power strips to turn them off), and switching to LED light bulbs to try to maintain or improve cheap electricity rates. You can do all those things anytime of the year, not just in the winter.
Active Business Services can help your business at any point in the year, whether you’re looking to take just a couple of steps to improve your electricity rates or need to more aggressively change your business’ energy conservation efforts. More specifically, we can help businesses utilize their historical consumption and load profile; our analysts are also skilled at determining the most effective purchasing strategy that can mitigate your risk to fluctuating market prices.
We offers products such as load following and market price services to help businesses better manage electricity costs, as well as block products, including base load block and peak block solutions.
Load following, for example, is a fixed price strategy that gives businesses the ability to secure a set electricity price for a specified term, like monthly or annually. It is one of the most common purchasing options for businesses on a budget. With a market price product, on the other hand, businesses pay a variable price for electricity that changes on an hourly basis.
Block products are a different solution that allow businesses to develop a strategy to mitigate risks of market volatility. Companies that choose block solutions can buy a specific portion of their electricity usage at a fixed rate, with the remaining portion being subject to market prices.
Our energy management experts can help you select the optimal block size (appropriate portion of electricity usage), tailored to your specific load profile and consumption pattern as a consumer. Two commonly used blocks include the base load block — which provides a select volume of electricity for a fixed rate over a 24 hour basis all seven days of the week — and the peak block, which offers a select volume of electricity for a fixed rate during On-Peak hours (between 7:00am – 11:00pm) for just five days a week (Monday – Friday).
Whether you and your business want to take small steps or big ones, there are many ways you can work on maintaining low energy costs.
I don’t know how some business owners are so good at sustaining cheap electricity rates, especially during colder winter months. Good that there are some energy management strategies that businesses, small and large, can use to manage their costs.
Maintaining cheap electricity rates – this is a topic that only becomes more important for Ontario businesses every year.
Our electricity costs once again increased this year. Im desperately trying to find some solutions to this. Glad I came across this site.
We’re in the same boat. Electricity rates have done nothing but increased each year. Our business has grown – that’s one reason. But cost has outpaced growth. Trying to find some strategies to resolve this.