Mountain View County — Energy Consulting
A Dairy Runs Around the Clock. That Changes What Your Bill Rewards.
Milk cooling, vacuum pumps, and water heating never really stop — and a flat load profile behaves very differently under a demand tariff than a seasonal one does. Whether that's working for you or against you depends on your rate class.
Load Factor Is the Thing Nobody Explains.
What's certain: demand charges bill your peak, while energy charges bill your total. The ratio between them is your load factor, and a dairy typically has a high one — steady draw, few dramatic spikes.
What's conditional: whether that's an advantage on your current rate. High load factor is generally favourable under a demand-based tariff, and some operations are on a rate class that doesn't reward it. Others are on one that does and don't realize the peak they're still setting during cleaning cycles or bulk tank pulldown.
This is one of the more common places we find money, and it usually isn't in equipment.
Refrigeration Heat Is Money You Already Paid For.
Certain: pulling milk from body temperature to storage temperature moves a large amount of heat, and that heat has to go somewhere. Meanwhile you're heating water separately for washdown.
Conditional: whether recovery makes sense on your setup. It depends on your existing plate cooler, your tank, your hot water demand, and what your electricity actually costs you all-in once delivery is included. On some operations the payback is short. On others the retrofit cost swamps it.
Same principle as everywhere else: the mechanism is well understood, your numbers aren't, and we'd rather measure than assume.
Who This Is For
Operations We Serve in Mountain View County
Dairy
Cow-calf and mixed cattle
Dryland grain
Greenhouse and horticulture
Commercial and light industrial along the QE2 corridor
The Assessment
What We Actually Look At
Your bills
Twelve months, line by line. Delivery charges, riders, retailer rate, administration fees, and which rate class you're on. We check whether you're on the right one.
Your loads
Panel and circuit inventory, motors, compressors, refrigeration, heating, irrigation. What's drawing power, when, and how much.
Your lighting
Fixture count, type, wattage, and hours of operation. This is usually where the fastest payback hides.
Your infrastructure
Transformer capacity, service voltage, and main breaker size. This determines what's even possible before anyone talks about equipment.
The Process
Four Steps, No Pressure
Send us your bills
Twelve months if you have them. We can pull them from your retailer if you don't.
We analyze
Rate class, demand profile, load breakdown, lighting inventory.
You get a written findings report
Where the money is going, what it would cost to change it, and what the payback looks like on each option.
You decide
Do the work with us, take the report to another contractor, or do nothing. It's yours either way.
Why Independent
We’d Rather Tell You No Than Sell You Something.
We’ve told operations that solar didn’t pencil out on their rate class. We’ve told others that lighting alone would get them most of the savings for a fraction of the cost. We’ve told a few that the fastest win was switching retailers.
That’s the job. The assessment is how we earn the right to recommend anything at all — and if the numbers don’t support a project, you’ll hear that instead.
Service Area
Towns We Serve in Mountain View County
Start With the Numbers.
The assessment is free and there’s no obligation attached to it. Worst case, you find out you’re already running efficiently — and that’s worth knowing too.
Get a Free Energy Assessment