Hurricane Electric’s Benny Ng was recently interviewed for an article in TechTarget about their use of utility rebates in a recent upgrade. From the article:
Where did you get your incentives?
We put in a higher-[efficiency] (Eaton) UPS that cost more than the baseline UPS [uninterruptible power supply]. We’ll be getting a sizeable incentive on this. We did a skylight project. We had a bunch of skylights on the roof that we ripped out and replaced with fiberglass, and we got a couple thousand dollars for that.
My point is that there are so many different projects that you can do — be it a UPS or an air conditioner where you’re getting tens of thousands of dollars — to smaller projects. It’s not like they’re only interested in big amounts of power savings. Anything you can do is good, even if it’s little bites.
You mentioned the baseline UPS. Can you explain that?
What PG&E does is determine the efficiency of the average or medium UPS, for example, and then determines the average cost for an X-sized UPS. When we got them, we tell them we want to put in a highly efficient UPS that is X% efficient and it will cost X amount of dollars. They will pay you up to half that difference.
What other incentives did you get?
Light sensors. I have a bunch of rows of cabinets, with lights over all the cabinets. In a data center, there aren’t a lot of people walking around, so I fixed up the sensors to shut the lights off when no one is around. For every sensor, they give you a certain amount of dollars. We also put in new exit lighting using LED lighting. That’s everything so far.
