National Grid reaches out to customers

National Grid is reaching out to their customers across New York and other states to share some energy-saving tips with them this summer. Energy usage can skyrocket in the summer, especially during the long, hot spells when everyone turns on their air conditioning and fans, and refrigerators and freezers are doing double duty. Conserving energy usage elsewhere doesn’t just help lower energy bills, but it also helps ensure that there is plenty of power to go around.

The energy giant’s elaborate system of measuring how much power there is from moment to moment indicates that there shouldn’t be any problems keeping up with the energy demand of the 6 million customers they serve, but also hope that those same customers will help them stretch the available energy even further.

“Power usage and demand is literally a minute-by-minute balancing act,” says National Grid’s Steve Brady. “Behind the scenes there is a lot of activity that the average customer doesn’t even think about.”

That includes rerouting power from low-use areas to high use, falling back on backup generators when the usage gets too high and even shutting some generators off if the usage drops. It also takes into consideration not just the energy usage readings of the moment, but also trends over the past years, economic activity and customer patterns.

In Western New York, there tends to be periods of holding patterns, but when the temperatures spike as they have been recently the power usage spikes with it. In the worst case scenario, this can lead to power brownouts -- instances where the power delivered to the home is enough to run appliances but not at peak efficiency -- or even blackouts. National Grid’s elaborate systems are in place to keep that from happening, but that job is made much easier with their customer’s help.

Their web site -- nationalgridus.com -- has a number of energy-saving tips for making the home’s energy usage more efficient. From things to do in the kitchen to ways to make laundry and lighting less of a drain on the checkbook, there are a myriad of tips that don’t take much to implement. Many of these tips are something that only a power company might think of.

Changing the thermostat just a few degrees can definitely have an impact on the bottom line -- a 3 degree temperature change in the right direction can cut almost 20 percent off the energy usage for the home’s heating and cooling. And something as simple as closing the curtains on the side of the house where the sun is shining can cut down on how hard the air conditioning has to work to keep the house cool.

Some energy-saving tips require a one-time investment, such as changing the bulbs to a more efficient type or lower wattage. Putting new gaskets on the refrigerator and keeping fans and vents clean will also make a big difference.

“It’s the small things,” Brady says. “If you start putting even two or three of those together, you can start to see a real difference. Energy usage has to do with the economy as well as the weather. People are really starting to take energy costs seriously and finding ways to save.”