The approach that we take to gain electricity efficiency in existing facilities is to install power treatment technologies to the individual loads in a facility and, where needed, to install passive or active power quality correction at either individual loads, individual branch circuits, or the master service entrance. The electricity savings from power treatment technologies originate from these concepts:

Today, the trend of achieving greater lighting efficiencies have come in the form of fluorescent and HID lighting. Though this lighting is more efficient than incandescent lighting, it is also true that neither fluorescent nor HID's are maximally efficient when connected to standard, sinusoidal waveform AC power. We have developed an entire line of special purpose waveform modification based lighting controllers that significantly reduce total energy consumed by these lighting fixtures, yet can achieve significant operating cost savings without reducing visible spectrum light output. Secondly, all of our lighting controller technologies have been designed to suppress or trap broadband harmonic content from the load side of the device, therefore adding to the systems cascade effect of both improved overall efficiency and improved overall facility power quality.

The practice of wiring a facility to meet National Electrical Code (NEC) and then being confident that the system must operate at acceptable efficiency is expensively misguided. The NEC, written by the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), designs electrical systems to be safe from causing fires. Not a single element of the NEC has been developed as a standard against which efficiency can be judged or calculated. Consequently, due to the failure of designing a system to be lightly loaded and cool operating, virtually every manufacturing plant we have encountered has been in serious need of remedial efforts to correct high current and distortion values. These values contribute to high electrical costs and higher cost from equipment replacement, repair, and down time.

We have found that the careful application of properly sized (by VAR) capacitive devices in very close proximity to inductive loads clearly meets the 'two benefit' standard of generating direct and indirect savings. While such an approach requires specifically creating an exactly matched capacitor network for every single treated load in a facility, it more than pays for the effort in quick payback through consumption savings, savings from reduced down time and maintenance, and savings from improved power quality.

Real line losses and voltage drops in commercial and industrial facilities far exceed the amounts, and effects, determined by classroom theories. Unlike these traditional calculation methods, which only consider isolated loads and circuits, real voltage drops in real facilities have wide ranging effects on the voltage and current values in the entire facility.