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What action has your company taken in response to the economic slump? Well, if your like most companies in the United States the normal reaction is to pull back, conserve cash, reduce spending, place all capital projects on hold and carefully evaluate maintenance spending. Is this the right thing to do? Let’s look at the big picture, the down turn won’t last forever, eventually the economy will recover, production will come back, by all indication this may occur within the next year or so. The million dollar question, are you prepared to handle the upturn? Rather then pulling back and restricting projects encourage energy efficiency improvement projects (with the appropriate cost justification). Don’t wait until demand increases, you will be too busy meeting deliveries and the project will again go on the back burner, now is the time to implement such measures. If you feel I am off base think about this:

• As production increase so goes energy demand

• Utilities have delayed building plants

• Transmission projects have been placed on hold

• Many coal fired power plant projects (base load) have been placed on hold or abandoned due

to numerous environmental complaint from special interest groups

So what does this mean? As the economy ramps up and manufacturing return we will see an energy shortage like never before. Utilities have long been concerned about just such an event. Many power companies have less than a 20% reserve margin under normal demand. Imagine the nations manufacturing in full swing and in the heat of the summer (typical high demand period), at our current capacity we would have zero margin and most likely rolling blackouts.

What’s the answer? As I have stated many times there is no silver bullet to our energy crisis, however there are stop gap measures that can protect your company, energy conservation. Implement you projects now, take advantage of the incentive programs available at the state, local, utility and federal level. By delaying project you risk higher implementation cost, possible loss of incentives and higher operating cost. Why wait until your company is in full production? It doesn’t make good business sense to disrupt production and possibly delay shipments, now is the time to evaluate your energy usage and look for ways to reduce long term operating cost.

Another bit of information, your rates will go up remember the utilities have delayed projects too. The net result of these delays, higher material cost, we all pay a higher price in the end.

An excellent resource for energy incentive programs is DSIRE (Data base for State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency). The time is now!!!!!