 We all get an electric bill every month and they can be a major cost in our operation. There are ways to save on our electricity costs and that could be purchasing energy efficient equipment. It also could be looking closely at the demand charges. Large customers in particular, the demand is a place where they have a large opportunity for savings. Let's look at the major components of an electric bill including the customer charge, uses charges, demand charges, and some of the other charges. The customer charge is charged every month and is a fixed cost for an operation. And that fixed meaning, no matter how much electricity you use, you're going to be charged this every month. The usage charges are going to change every month depending on how much electricity you use. And that's typically in units of kilowatt hours. And so looking at those, anything that's charged per kilowatt hour, I'm calling a usage charge. The demand charges are charges that are for how much power you are drawing at a peak moment in time for that operation. It's set typically once a year and you're charged that rate for the rest of the year. And that's usually charged per KW or per unit power. And so identifying when you set that peak and trying to lower that peak is one operation that could be done to save. Other charges could be adjustments, taxes, other types of fees, energy efficiency fees, environmental fees, things like that. A little later, we're going to look for these components in an electric bill. We're going to look at an example of a swine operation. And swine operations have a number of large loads that can run simultaneously at times. Those could be ventilation, water pumping, feeders, lighting, all of which are very large loads. And when those combine and run at the same time, we can set demand at those times. And so we're going to look at an example where maybe savings could be identified with respect to demand. I have a chart here where I've kind of shown some of the loads in that swine operation including the ventilation fans, which are the two lines running at the top. They're running all the time to keep those animals comfortable. We have a water load in blue here. The water pump runs when the animals need water which is mostly during the day when they're awake. And then also we have a lighting load which is a fairly low but constant load down here at the bottom. And then finally we have the feeders turning on and off. And so the feeders turn on and off in the morning and then again in the afternoon. What I'm showing here is how demand can add up where if I'm adding up all of the loads at a particular increment of time of about 15 minutes, this might add up to about 45 kW here when I add up these loads. And if that's the time that sets my peak demand for the year, then that's what I'm going to be charged for. So if I can avoid that peak demand at that particular time, I might be able to lower my monthly bill every month. So this is an example where the feeders went off at different times. And you can see that if I add these up that I'm going to be closer to 35 kW, which you can see that that's 10 less. And if that's 10 kW less and that's the time I set my peak, then I might be saving 10 kW of demand times a rate if it could be as high as $10 per kW, that'd be $100 a month all year long that I'm saving. So those numbers can get higher if a load for a farm is quite a lot higher, which I've seen loads in the hundreds of kW rather than in the tens like this example here. Now we're going to spend some time looking at our example electric bill and we're going to try to identify those four main components within our electric bill. You can see beside me here our example electric bill and first let's look for that customer charge. That customer charge is clearly identified at the top at $3.25. If we're thinking about the next charge, which would be the usage charge, remember those are charged per kWh. So first let's try to identify how much electricity in kWh we use during this billing period. And so if we look at this bill it says that we use 2,322 kWh during the billing period. And then we can look down that bill and identify all of the places where we're charged per kWh. Now some of them are broken apart maybe because they had different suppliers so only part of that 2,300 kWh was charged for that while other times all 2,322 were charged for that rate. If we add all those up we get $15.85 so basically $15.85 per kWh is our usage charge. So for every kWh we use it costs us $15.85. When we're thinking about that usage charge we can also look that it is split apart into different pieces. The energy charge or how much it costs to purchase the electricity itself versus the distribution, the transmission as well as some other kind of miscellaneous fees like the societal charge and the system control charge are all parts of the usage fees in this particular bill. If we move on to demand again we need to figure out how much demand we have for this particular bill. And remember that demand is based on the peak use through your whole year and so they have that calculated here and that peak use is $11.9 kW for this particular bill. But then they actually made an adjustment to that and raised it to $14.9 kW and that's because of the power factor where all the machinery that was being used caused lower quality electricity and they actually had to feed that facility more electricity to compensate for that. And that's called power factor and so they adjusted that to power factor and got $14.9 kW as the demand charge. This particular bill charges by demand anything over $10 kW so in this case $4.9 was used over $10 kW and they multiplied that times the rate of $3.16. So $3.16 per kW is the demand charge for this particular operation. Then there always is those miscellaneous charges and you see interest and security deposit and other things. There is one charge on here that is negative and so that's some of the adjustments that were made to try to clear up from previous billing cycles and things like that. So spend some time with your electric bill, identify what you're charged and what for and really look at that demand charge and see if there's any opportunity for savings. You can find some further resources at the following links and learn more about your electric bill and some of the details involved in calculating the different parts of your electric bill.