Having served South Jersey since 1924, Atlantic City Electric knows a thing or two about the unique and varied needs of customers stretching from the river to the Shore.
It’s not just residential clients who rely on Atlantic City Electric: It counts the region’s businesses among its 560,000 customers, too. Since July 2021, it’s offered those businesses meticulously crafted efficiency-boosting and cost-minimizing options.
“Utilities, in one form or another, have been offering incentives to customers for years,” says Paul Miles, CEM, Atlantic City Electric’s manager of Commercial & Industrial Energy Efficiency Programs. “Today, it’s absolutely critical that we do so with a focus on the customer.”
Miles explains that Atlantic City Electric’s Energy Solutions for Business program includes four overarching program buckets:
* Prescriptive and Custom: Intended to help customers find high-efficiency improvements and upgrades reducing operational costs, trade allies administer these programs under the utility’s supervision and on its behalf in what is by far the biggest program. The comprehensive effort also helps participants with locations across different utilities’ territories by delivering equipment upgrades that can be incentivized at levels that are the same across New Jersey, from utility to utility.
* Engineered Solutions: Atlantic City Electric’s energy experts will proactively guide customers toward the solutions best suited to their needs, which comes with benefits like reduced energy and maintenance costs, support in project planning and extended equipment life.
* Energy Management: This program fine-tunes a facility’s systems to operate with optimized efficiency. Miles additionally describes it as having a host of smaller programs focusing on elements like HVAC and full-building tune-ups, strategic approaches that yield more efficient energy consumption, and pairing monitoring software to a facility’s energy-management system to optimize performance.
* Small Business Direct Install (SBDI): SBDI is intended for small business customers whose monthly average peak kilowatt hour demand doesn’t exceed 200 kW. The program offers significant financial incentives for upgrading to more energy-efficient equipment (including labor), reducing utility costs while improving a working environment’s air quality and comfort.
“SBDI is an amazing program, and we largely target customers that tend to be smaller on the energy scale,” Miles says. “They could garner incentives of up to 80% of the project cost—it doesn’t mean that everybody gets 80%, but they can get up to that. It is an extremely generous program when it comes to incentives, and customers who have engaged with it have given nothing but positive feedback.”
One of those very happy SBDI participants is Theo Roustopoulos, a third-generation owner/operator of five Pat’s Pizzeria locations. He has been “blown away” by his experiences with Atlantic City Electric, which has been one of two parties helping finance every one of his company’s upgrade efforts by cutting anywhere from 70 to 79% of those costs.
“I can’t think of a reason not to take part in it,” he begins. “It’s a very beneficial program for me, specifically for the type of operations that we run, where I do have several locations I consider more like mom-and-pop small businesses [in] old buildings that need upgrades. For example, I needed new HVAC units. When you’re quoting that out and you realize it’s going to cost you $30,000, and then a program like this comes across your desk, it’s very helpful.”
He adds that, given how tough the food industry can be, any assistance makes a difference. It’s especially beneficial when that help is streamlined through one attentive, knowledgeable person, like the Trade Ally Roustopoulos has been working with who has “become kind of like my champion for all of my stores.”
“I built a good relationship with my Trade Ally. He has good relationships with Atlantic City Electric and South Jersey Gas, and it’s pretty seamless. He’ll come to me and say, ‘What do you need done? Let’s see if it fits in this program,’ and the program managers on the other side of that have been very generous with deciding, ‘Oh, yeah, that fits in here,’” Roustopoulos says. He laughingly adds, “At first, my question was, ‘What’s the catch here?’ …. [Then] I went for the second [project] and the third, and I’m working on my fourth.”
No matter what program a company opts for, Atlantic City Electric customers have 0% financing available to cover out-of-pocket costs.
“In today’s world, where do you get 0%?” Miles points out. “Our programs are relatively new to the marketplace. When we stood this up, we knew we had to offer something above and beyond just the financial incentives.”
After all, prioritizing both affordability and accessibility helps the utility work toward its goal of continuing to connect diverse communities while powering a 21st-century economy, all with a watchful eye on the future.
“We’re very appreciative and glad we’re able to help with affordability and sustainability goals, and those things that are important to our customers but, at the end of the day, we’ve got a lot more ground to cover,” says Miles. “It’s important to ensure the people who live and work in our communities can take advantage of all of these programs. We’ll be doing this for years to come.”
Atlantic City Electric, an Exelon Company
Serving South Jersey
(800) 642-3780
AtlanticCityElectric.com/SNJBusiness
