As a business, one of your most important resources has typically been given little thought. Energy. Sure, we all like to complain about energy costs and are momentarily furious when an outage occurs, but on the whole, we have been spoiled by cheap reliable electricity. For the vast majority of companies, energy is a fairly insignificant expense as a percentage of cost of goods sold. Yet it is indispensable. Without energy, you have nothing. Luckily, we didn’t need to worry about it, because it was cheap, plentiful and reliable. Unfortunately, you can’t take that for granted anymore.
This post is not to blame or point fingers. Rather it is a wake-up call to all of us to recognize that what we have taken for granted for so long cannot be relied on moving forward. Energy will no longer be cheap, plentiful and reliable. Don’t be fooled by pundits of any persuasion, they are cherry picking data to fit their narrative. The system as a whole is in trouble and one much touted sexy technology isn’t going to save it.
What can we expect:
- Extremely high electricity price volatility. (ERCOT now swings from negative prices to $5,000 MWh in a single day)
- Substantial increases in electricity bills as new infrastructure must be put in place.
- Substantial increases in electricity bills as new generation must be brought on-line to replace retiring base load plants.
- Substantial increase in load putting additional strain on the grid.
- Declining power quality. Result of the vast increase in inverters and switching power supplies.
- Increase number and severity of outages due to extreme weather.
- Increase number and severity of outages due to aging grid infrastructure.
- Increase number and severity of brownouts due to falling and uncertain capacity margins.
There is nothing you can do to make the system better. It is simply too big for any single organization. The domestic electricity market is $ 500 billion dollars per year and comprises 642,000 miles of high voltage transmission lines, 5 million miles of distribution lines and thousands of generators. Face it. You need to focus on your operation and be very skeptical that the market and government will herd the cats well enough to avoid problems.
You need to get backup power not only to operate when outages and brownouts occur but to also manage the price volatility that will hurt your bottom line. Your best choice of action is to engage Exergy Energy, your concierge utility. We work for you to provide energy as a service and get you the power security and quality you need with no CAPEX. https://exergyenergy.com