Forum: Businesses have options to curb fuel costs

Small-business owners who think it may be difficult to reduce their environmental footprint can begin the process on a small scale, say those who advocate abandoning oil as a source of energy in favor of more environmentally friendly resources.
“I think, by and large, small businesses get it,” said U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, who participated in a recent “Get off Oil” forum hosted Nov. 4 by Environment Rhode Island at Brown University. “They see the bottom line. They see the cost of fuel going up and they want to control cost.”
Cost containment is an issue most small businesses have been struggling with over the last several years and they may be looking for incentives to control costs, Reed said.
Programs such as the one National Grid has in place to assist businesses make the transition from oil to natural gas is an example of what’s available to Rhode Island small-business owners, Reed said.
When deciding to abandon oil, National Grid offers businesses a consultation and contractors help develop a plan tailored to the individual businesses’ needs.
Converting businesses to natural gas takes less time and money than thought, National Grid says.
As part of National Grid’s Business Choice Program, businesses can choose a natural gas supplier and National Grid delivers or transports the natural gas to the business site.
The natural gas companies basically “rent space” on National Grid’s pipelines. National Grid has to ensure reliable delivery through their system. National Grid says there’s no difference in service or in the price of businesses’ bills.
Switching from oil as a source of energy should be a no-brainer, considering the costs to the country as well as to the environment, Reed said.
“Our dependence on oil has huge economic costs to the country,” Reed said. “It is [also] environmental costs and significant national-security costs.
In terms of economic cost, the country’s biggest current account deficit is oil coming into the U.S. from overseas, he said.
The reasons to abandon oil outweigh the benefits to keep it, said Caroline A. Karp, a senior lecturer in Brown University’s Center for Environmental Studies, but some small businesses may not realize how easy it is to make a change.
“A lot of small businesses generate waste material from the form of carbons … so businesses that are dealing with food will generate something that can be composted. Methane is an example, methane can be used as the fuel,” Karp said. She points to Quonset Point, where she says there are a lot of examples where the waste materials from chemical companies can be used as the raw heat to power another heat source, and in each case that means that less oil has to be used.
“That kind of thing is supposed to pay itself back kind of quickly,” she said. “And if it’s a petroleum footprint as opposed to using oil in your tank, there are different ways you rely on your oil. There’s oil you actually put in your burner for heat, for example, to heat your hot-water system, then there’s what we call virtual oil.”
Virtual oil is when you’re not directly burning oil, but your oil company is. You can reduce your oil footprint, or carbon footprint, is such cases by switching to compact fluorescent light bulbs, which last longer and as a result use much less energy than incandescent bulbs.
“So a company’s energy bills would start to go down,” Karp said. “Unfortunately, our energy bills are not necessarily that high, so companies may not see that as [enough of an] incentive.”
Stephan Wollenburg, green-energy program director at People’s Power & Light, says there are programs available for small businesses that provide free assessments to inform them of ways of saving money by cutting.
There are also equipment upgrades, such as switching to geothermal or heat pumps, and programs businesses can join and pay a small fee to have a fixed payment rate.
Mike Bailey, assistant production manager at Newport Biodiesel, agreed that there are things small businesses can do if they can not fully stop their reliance on oil on their own, such as exploring opportunities that are available to help with the transition as well as taking advantage of other energy-cutting programs that may be out there.
Bailey, who participated in a panel discussion at the forum, earned a biodiesel fellowship and stated his own small company, before joining Newport Biodiesel.
Newport Biodiesel produces a clean-burning and sustainable fuel from vegetable oil collected from more than 800 restaurant partners in the New England.
“We make a 100 percent recyclable waste product that can be used in food, in the medical industry and water,” Bailey said. “It also can be separated and sent as compost to farmers to help their vegetation grow.” &#8226

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