It was Christmas Eve 2008 and Bob Bechtold had one last project to wrap up before heading home. The president and founder of Ontario, N.Y.-based Harbec Plastics Inc. was working on his green energy consumption report for the U.S. Department of Energy, but something wasn’t adding up. Puzzled, he flipped it back to the finance department to check his figures, but he was assured there were no errors. Despite steadily growing the business each year for the past three years, his energy costs had gone down by 35 percent.

“I was absolutely flabbergasted. Even though I’ve been preaching about it, I never realized how much impact it would have.”

While Bechtold admits to harboring a certain tie-died-save-the-Earth-hippy streak, his alternative/Green energy investments at Harbec have all been driven by economics. The custom injection molding company’s relationship with alternative sources of energy dates back eight years. At that time, the company was completely reliant on the municipal grid for its power, and “brown-outs” were becoming a significant problem.

Harbec supplies complicated, one-of-a-kind parts to a range of industries including medical, automotive and consumer goods, with very short lead times. A power disruption is the worst possible problem the operation can encounter. Any interruption means the sophisticated sequences being performed by computer numeric control (CNC) machines and computer-aided design (CAD) stations are lost, requiring six to eight hours to reprogram and restart. Resetting the other machines in the process requires at least another hour of production time, and then the company must account for raw materials wasted due to damaged or lost batches. In June 1999 alone, Harbec experienced three such outages.

“Brown-outs are insidious,” says Bechtold. “Everything in the place is computerized, so with a brown-out, we’d not only lose batches, but we’d have to replace burned-out circuit boards, causing even more machine downtime. The utility really had nothing to say about it. They offered to put a power facility a little closer to Harbec, but it would cost us $100,000 and there was no guarantee it would make a difference.”

Off the grid

Instead, Bechtold started looking for ways to reduce or eliminate Harbec’s reliance on the electrical grid. The solution was the installation of an ultra-efficient Combined Heat and Power (CHP, also referred to as cogeneration) plant based on twenty-five 30-kilowatt (kW) natural gas-fueled Capstone microturbines. This was supplemented with a 250 kW German-manufactured Fuhrlaender wind turbine that meets up to 25 percent of the plant’s power needs. The hot exhaust from the micro turbines is directed to a heat exchanger, which is able to transfer the heat to water. The hot water is then used to heat the 9,000-square-foot plant through radiant in-floor heating systems, and through pre-existing forced-air systems. During the summer, the hot water is sent to an absorptive chiller, which uses heat to create cold water for air conditioning.

Despite the fact that the microturbines were the most capital-intensive option available at the time, Bechtold believes that they are the most cost-effective in the long term. The simplified design of the microturbine, which only has one moving part, means the same staff responsible for maintaining the rest of the plant’s equipment require little training to manage the power generators.

The overall investment ties back to something Bechtold calls “eco-economics.” “Every decision we make, we make with a view to the bottom line, and renewable energy gives me a lock on my energy costs for the next 25 years. CHP makes us much more efficient. Those things add up to a very nice economic advantage, which, in turn, makes good business sense.

“I never lead with the ‘green’ message any more,” he says. “No one cares. But carbon costs money. So who cares about carbon? Just save money. Then the world wins.”

But wind power and CHP/cogen isn’t right for everyone. For one thing, not everyone is sitting on a Class three wind site as does Harbec Plastics. And with a veritable windfall of government funding and regulatory demands—such as the Renewable Fuels Standard, which President Bush introduced and President Obama is expected to stiffen—driving research, the alternative energy environment has become incredibly open and innovative.

Energy smorgasbord

In fact, there is a veritable smorgasbord of alternative, or “renewable,” energy sources that can be harnessed to help organizations become more energy independent and reduce their carbon footprints. Anaerobic digestion, geothermal power, wind power, small-scale hydropower, solar power, biomass power, tidal power, nuclear and wave power have all become legitimate options.

“Those energy sources have always been ...