Energy Efficiency Plan
What is Duke Energy’s Energy Efficiency Plan?
Duke Energy is committed to finding new ways to help your business address rising energy costs with environmentally sound, low-cost options. Our Energy Efficiency (save-a-watt) Plan is a new regulatory approach to energy efficiency. The plan supports the development of energy efficiency conservation programs to help our customers save money and energy. By using less energy, we can help keep energy rates lower and reduce the need to build additional power plants.
Features & Benefits
- Provides all customers with new Energy Efficiency programs, including energy assessments and incentive rebates, making access to energy-saving equipment easy and affordable.
- Reduces electricity consumption, helping Duke Energy avoid building new generation facilities.
- Represents an important departure from traditional energy efficiency regulatory models where utilities are compensated based on how much they spend rather than the results they produce. Under the plan, Duke Energy will only be paid for verified energy reductions.
How It Works
- Duke Energy will assist customers in “saving watts” rather than relying solely on building new power plants to meet energy demands.
- Duke Energy will provide all customers with energy efficiency programs to help them conserve energy.
- After four years, the energy efficiency programs are projected to displace the need for 1,700 megawatts (MW) of capacity, or about 745,000 megawatt hours. As the results from new energy efficiency programs are realized, the company will retire older coal plants, significantly reducing emissions. This MW reduction lessens the need for new power generation and helps keeps rates lower.
- The cost associated with implementation of our Energy Efficiency Plan will be shared among all customers. Initially, the plan is expected to add only one tenth of a percent to the average commercial and industrial customers’ power bill – but your power bill could be reduced by as much as fifteen percent if actively participating in the programs.
- All Duke Energy industrial customers and qualifying large commercial customers in North Carolina can “opt out” of the program if they’ve developed their own energy efficiency programs or intend to do so in the near term.
