Smart Mobility Today had a conversation with Jeremy Mondrella and learned about the DTE Commercial and Industrial Energy Efficiency Program.
Jeremy, welcome to the show! Can you start the conversation by describing your role in DTE’s Commercial and Industrial Energy Efficiency Program?
My name is Jeremy Mondrella. I’ve been with DTE’s commercial and industrial program for just over two years now, and I’m an energy advisor. My role is essentially connecting customers with the available rebates for energy efficiency, and really trying to help them along that process start to finish!
What are some of the projects that customers still have time to submit (earn rebates or bonus rebates for?) before the 2024 program year ends?
The deadline is coming up and there’s a whole catalog of projects — everything from LEDs and controls to HVAC controls to process equipment. We even have a couple of maintenance measures like boiler and chiller tune ups.
The big one right now, if you’re looking for a project to do, is free compressed air nozzles. Those are a replacement for open hole blow off or any type of air blow off applications.
The big advantage of those is obviously the energy savings as well as the noise saving. In two years, we’ve done more than 230 of those. That’s about two and a half thousand homes – impacting their electricity consumption for a year or about the same energy as about a million and a half gallons of gas. And on average, these customers are saving about $9,000 in electric costs.
The big thing is that noise reduction: down even 10 decibels, which is a huge amount in terms of the industrial settings. Now is a great time to get involved because we’re kind of in a unique situation.
You talked about Compressed Air Nozzles as being a quick win for manufacturers, what are other projects that you see customers submitting for rebates currently?
Any projects completed within 2024 are still eligible for their rebates and the bonus rebates. As long as you can get us that information, we can even help submit that application on your behalf — as long as we have that project information and the kind of supporting documents that we’re going to need.
A big easy one right now is chiller and boiler tune-ups.
You know, we’re getting into the heating season. We’re getting into winter. Everybody’s doing their boiler tune ups.
We’re happy to help you put together that application. If you have process boilers, we’ve changed the way that we calculate that to make it a little bit better. So, if you have a large process boiler, say over 10,000 MBH input, that rebate has increased and should help cover the cost of that maintenance even more.
What are customers and contractors saying about their experience in participating in the program?
Customers speak very highly of the program. One of the things that we do is that we track customer satisfaction internally. That’s been a major priority for us, and they really tend to like the level of support that we offer.
We are happy to submit those applications for our customers and contractors, and we really get a lot of good feedback around that. Many are also very surprised by the amount of rebates that we have to offer. So, they like having that kind of one-on-one interaction with us, someone to help guide them through that process.
I appreciate the opportunity to share a little bit more about what our program is, what it does, and how it works. I really just want to encourage the customers that are listening to this, to reach out to us.
Final thoughts?
Our goal is to give away money, and reduce your energy use. And the big one recently is sustainability. That’s really been a focus of a lot of larger customers, a lot of suppliers.
So, you know, let us help you with that. It makes you more sustainable and it helps your bottom line.
The program year ends December 2nd.
So, we’d absolutely love it if you can get those applications into us — get the information to us. Let us help you with that application process.
Now is the time to start that journey, if you haven’t already.
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