One bad hour sets your bill for the entire month.
Demand charges are based on your highest power draw in any single interval during the billing period. Fifteen minutes of everything running at once — the HVAC starting up, the sort kicking off, the chargers plugging in, the compressors cycling simultaneously — and that spike follows you on every bill for the next 30 days.
In many commercial and industrial tariff structures, demand charges are 30–50% of the total electricity bill. Not energy consumed. Capacity reserved. You're paying for the worst moment, not the average.
The frustrating part: most demand peaks are avoidable. They happen because systems don't coordinate. Everything starts at the same time because everything is on independent schedules. Nobody told the HVAC that the sort is about to start. Nobody told the chargers that the compressors are about to defrost. Each system is optimized individually. The combined load profile is nobody's problem.
30–50%
of the total bill is demand charges — not energy consumed, but capacity reserved
15 min
One bad interval sets the demand charge for the entire billing period
What changes with Wattif.
Wattif sees every load in the building as one coordinated problem. Not HVAC optimization here and EV charging optimization there — one model, one objective, one set of constraints.
The Optimization Engineer coordinates every asset in the building against a single objective: keep peak demand as low as possible without disrupting operations. It doesn't optimize systems in isolation. It optimizes the building.
Staggers startup sequences.
The building doesn't need everything at full power simultaneously. Wattif brings systems online in sequence — HVAC first, then lighting, then production equipment — so the peak is spread across 30 minutes instead of hitting in 5. The result is the same operational readiness with a dramatically lower demand signature.
Shifts flexible loads to off-peak windows.
Defrost cycles, pre-cooling, battery charging, water heating — loads that have timing flexibility get moved to windows where they don't stack on top of critical loads. The work still gets done. It just happens at a time that doesn't set a new monthly high.
Responds in real-time when a peak is approaching.
If current demand is trending toward a new monthly high, Wattif temporarily curtails non-critical loads — reducing lighting in unoccupied zones, widening HVAC setpoints slightly, pausing EV charging for 15 minutes — to keep the peak below the threshold. The curtailment is brief, targeted, and automatic. Nobody needs to notice it happened.
Never disrupts the operation.
Every curtailment decision respects operational constraints. Parcels don't move late. Temperatures stay in range. Comfort isn't compromised. The operation comes first. Always. Wattif finds the savings in the margin between what the building needs and what the building wastes — and it never crosses that line.
The numbers.
A 15–25% reduction in peak demand translates directly to 15–25% lower demand charges. For a facility paying $10,000–$30,000 per month in demand charges alone, that's $18,000–$90,000 back every year. Not from capital upgrades. Not from new equipment. From intelligence applied to equipment that's already there.
15–25%
peak demand reduction
$18–90K
annual savings on demand charges
< 4 mo
typical payback period
Tell us your peak demand.
We'll show you how much of it is avoidable — and what your building would look like with coordinated load management.
Talk to us