by Michael Kanellos – greentechmedia.com
July 30, 2009
It’s like outsourcing for an industrial boiler.
EPS, which makes equipment for controlling power to industrial equipment, has released a program under which companies can purchase EPS’s technology as a service, rather than a bunch of equipment.
Under EPS PowerSaver, clients sign a one- to five-year agreement with the company. EPS owns the equipment and runs it and charges a fee to the client. No capital expense and the energy savings, ideally, cover the cost of the service. EPS takes a percentage of the amount saved.
The Costa Mesa, Calif.-based company, which has been around since 2001, specializes in monitoring and curbing power consumption at industrial sites and, in particular, at food and beverage facilities, such as breweries or dairies. At one dairy, it cut electrical consumption by 22.6 percent, CEO Jay Zoellner told us in an interview in April.
“You first need to measure and manage; and executives, for the most part, do not understand where and how they can control energy use,” he said.
At a brewery, EPS cut down power use, but it also extracted solids from the wastewater stream that were turned into methane and used onsite for power. Yum!
Energy efficiency has moved to the forefront in the greentech world in the last year (see Better Cold Water Through Software and Eleven Cool Names and Concepts to Watch in Air Conditioning). It isn’t as exciting as solar panels or electric cars, but Zoellner (among others) notes that efficiency solutions cost quite a bit less and can provide payback in a year or less. Efficiency companies also don’t need expensive dedicated factories; hence, VCs have remained interested despite the economic crunch.
Some of the other efficiency/control companies to keep an eye on include: Recycled Energy Development (waste heat recovery), Cimetrics (real estate power management), Tririga (real estate), HID Laboratories (networking lights) and Optimum Energy (air con controls).
The heart of the company’s intellectual property is xChange Point, which gathers information about power consumption from boilers and other pieces of machinery. The data is normalized so that factory managers can compare power consumption at different parts of the year, or in different geographies where heating and cooling requirements might vary. It also compensates for weather.