Manufacturing Energy Management in the Sacramento Metro

The Sacramento Municipal Utility District is community-owned and operates its own balancing authority, which places Sacramento outside both Direct Access and Community Choice Aggregation. There is no supplier to bid. SMUD's rates run well below neighboring PG&E, and that gap is precisely why Sacramento facilities under-manage energy: the bill looks reasonable, so nobody audits it. The two things that consistently return money here are time-of-use period management against SMUD's summer peak window, and rate schedule verification on multi-building state and healthcare campuses where meters were classified years ago and never revisited.

Manufacturing is not the dominant sector in this territory, where state government, healthcare systems, university load and regional distribution carry most of the commercial load. That is an advantage worth using: a manufacturing load is unfamiliar enough locally that it is routinely priced off generic assumptions rather than off your actual usage. A 24/7 baseload with peak production hours profile at 500,000+ kWh/month is the specific thing we take to market, and with supply fixed by SMUD, the work concentrates on the demand component, the rate schedule and recovering billing errors — which on a load this size is not a rounding error.