Seattle City Light has increased the incentives it offers businesses to install energy efficient lighting and equipment through the rest of the year.
Seattle City Light has increased the incentives it offers businesses to install energy efficient lighting and equipment through the rest of the year.
“As the economy continues its sluggish recovery, Seattle City Light wants to help businesses make investments in energy efficiency that will lower their operating costs, put more people to work and reduce pressure on the utility to acquire more energy resources to meet growing demand,” Conservation Resources Director Glenn Atwood said. “For a business, this puts more money toward your project, less money toward your bill.”
Medium and large businesses can save up to an additional 15 percent on most measures for new commercial projects.
As an example, a typical lighting upgrade can produce energy savings of nearly 460,000 kilowatt-hours per year. Under the previous incentives, a business would have received about $92,000 in incentives to apply toward the work. At the new levels, that project would qualify for about $105,000, a $13,000 increase.
Small businesses can now earn rebates on 80 percent of the average installed cost for most lighting retrofit fixtures. The standard rebate would have been about 50 percent.
As an example, a company that replaced metal halide lighting with pulse start metal halide lights and retrofit its T12 fluorescent lighting with more efficient T8 fixtures could reduce their energy consumption by about 27,000 kilowatt-hours per year.
The previous incentives would have provided $2,420. With the increase, that business owner would have $3,565 of the cost covered by the incentives.
Rebates are also available on new fixtures. Details on the full range of incentives and rebates that are available can be found online at http://seattle.gov/light/conserve/Business/default.asp .
Seattle City Light is the 10th largest public electric utility in the United States. It has some of the lowest cost customer rates of any urban utility, providing reliable, renewable and environmentally responsible power to nearly 1 million Seattle area residents. City Light has been greenhouse gas neutral since 2005, the first electric utility in the nation to achieve that distinction.