Cool as a cuccumber: Produce warehouse offers real-life insight about demand response

It's not often that companies in the green tech or green IT space offer up customers who can talk about their actual experiences with their technology, but now that some businesses have been experimenting with this stuff for a while, maybe that will change.

Powerit Solutions was good enough to connect me with one of the reference accounts for their energy management hardware and software, a California-based cold storage provider called Anchor Warehouse Services. Anchor Warehouse uses a number of Powerit technologies, including its energy management platform, the Konnekt Wireless IO, its energy monitoring and reporting dashboard and its temperature monitoring and reporting option.

Garth Ramseier, president of Anchor Warehouse, says his company used a different energy management solutions previously but needed to upgrade its basic infrastructure in order to keep rising utility costs in hand. It researched four different companies before deciding to go with Powerit's technology.

Before I share Ramseier's impressions of the solution, first, a moment on the problem at hand. For one thing, it's not unusual for temperatures to reach 100 degrees in the locations where any one of Anchor Warehouse's three facilities make their home. Second, the stuff that's stored in these facilities is highly sensitive produce, which means temperature and humidity levels all must be closely monitored.

So, what Anchor Warehouse needed was a system that could keep tabs on all these things AND at the same time deal with helping the company hold down its energy costs during periods of peak demand. It does so by monitoring the facility every 15 minutes and making adjustments as needed -- such as turning off fans that aren't needed or starting pre-cooling during the middle of the night.

Anchor Warehouse reports that it saw results quickly: Peak demand charges were cut by 35 percent and it realized overall monthly savings of 17 percent, even though production had increased by 15 percent during the time period in which those measurements were made. Ramseier says he saw the payback from the technology investment within one year.