What kinds of energy rebates are there for commercial green buildings, from the landlord and/or tenant side? How can they be best utilized?

The utilities provide many types of rebates that would apply both to a tenant and the building owner.

To give you an overview of what often motivates the utilities which is often different than either the tenant or building owner is concerned, remember that electricity is both the amount of kWh and KW. What that means is that you consume kWh or kilowatt hours by having lights, air conditioning/heating/ventilation, computers, etc.. Then there are the momentary spikes of KW when say you start up all of the HVAC lights, etc. or on a very hot day there might be a higher peak KW. Now kWh makes up most of your invoice and the KW is often a small part of the invoice.

I wanted to explain that difference as a utility company has what they call sub-stations where high voltage is then stepped down to lower voltage and distributed to a grid or section of land. Those are expensive parts of their infrastructure and what can cause them to spend more dollars on capital is peak KW.

Thus many of the rebates are often focused to reduce peak KW such as lighting, more efficient motors, and things like curtailment, incentives to shut off power at peak condiitons. Most of the KW rebates are all based on a type of technology and paid by size of a motor, per lighting fixture, etc. Those rebates usually provide just enough of an incentive to motivate you to the lower KW technology and might save you a little energy in the process. Most of those rebates are ideally best utilized anytime you have a repair or failure of that device. In lighting when the fixtures are getting close to the time to relamp them, it might be a good time to review the rebate options before just replacing the exisiting technology with the same type.

There are also what they call curtailment programs which are also focused on KW but many times those can be simple things to do that can lower your utility rate or give you a rebate for participating. Curtailment usually means that if you shut off KW when the utility asks you to you will get paid a rebate each time you do so and for agreeing to participate even if they do not ask you to drop KW. Keep in mind an efficient building can not drop any KW without the people in the building seeing or feeling a change. Curtailment is shutting off or reducing some output of lights, HVAC, etc. These rebates are both for the owner or tenant but must be carefully reviewed as either comfort or lighting levels will be compromised in the process.

Lastly the other main type of rebates are custom rebates. Those are often the best available. Those are best utilized when you have benchmarked your energy usage and determined that your usage is high. Then the next step would be to perform an investment grade audit as these rebates usually require an audit and calculations performed and stamped by a licenced professional engineer. These rebates can often pay up to 50% of a capital upgrade to reduce energy. These rebates are mainly for the owner of the building or a single occupant tenant occupying a stand alone building.