Cut a Commercial Building's Energy Cost Before You Buy Anything

Read the demand line first

On a residential bill everything is energy. On a commercial demand account you're billed twice: once for how much you used, and once for how fast you used it at your worst moment.

LCEC's 2026 General Service–Demand schedule bills $11.00 per kW of billing demand. The tariff also states that billing demand is never less than 20 kW, the contract demand if applicable, or 70% of the maximum measured demand in the preceding eleven months. Read that last clause twice. If you hit 300 kW once in August, you're billed on at least 210 kW every month afterward for nearly a year.

This is why a demand-charge problem is an operations problem before it's an equipment problem. Nothing you install fixes a peak you set last August.

Stagger your startup

The classic peak in a restaurant, a shop, or a small plant is everything coming on at once at opening. Rooftop units, compressors, ovens, fryers, air handlers. If they all start within the same fifteen minutes, that fifteen minutes is your bill.

Sequencing equipment over thirty to sixty minutes costs nothing but a conversation with whoever opens. On some buildings this is the single largest saving available and it requires no capital at all.

Find the schedules nobody set

• Rooftop units conditioning the building on Sunday because the schedule was never programmed
• Parking-lot lighting on a timer that hasn't been adjusted since daylight saving
• Exhaust fans running twenty-four hours in a kitchen that's open ten
• Walk-in cooler doors that no longer seal
• Air compressors cycling all night against a leak in the line

None of these are exciting and all of them are money. A compressed-air leak survey and a weekend walkthrough with a clamp meter routinely find more savings than the first year of a solar array.

Then the lighting

If the building still has metal halide, high-pressure sodium, or first-generation fluorescent, an LED and controls retrofit is usually the fastest payback on the property. It also reduces cooling load, because the light you were producing was partly heat you were then paying to remove.

There's a second benefit specific to solar: cutting load first means the array you eventually buy is smaller for the same offset percentage. Efficiency first is cheaper than generation first, every time.

Check the power factor

Many commercial tariffs let the utility adjust your billing demand upward if your power factor drops below 90% lagging at maximum demand. Motors, older lighting ballasts, and welding equipment drag it down. Correction equipment is cheap relative to the penalty, and most owners have never been told the penalty exists.

What's left after all that

Now you have a smaller, better-understood load, and a real answer about whether your problem is energy or demand. If it's energy, solar is the conversation. If it's demand, storage is the conversation and solar is secondary. If it's both, the sequencing matters — do the free work, then the lighting and controls, then the HVAC if it's near end of life, then generation sized to what remains.

Doing it in that order typically costs less in total than starting with the array, and it makes the array's numbers honest.

Questions worth asking

• What is my billing demand, and does my tariff have a ratchet clause?
• What time of day does my peak occur, and what's running then?
• Has anyone ever set the schedules on the rooftop units?
• What's my power factor at maximum demand?