To meet increasing demands on utilities, C&I customers carry the heaviest share of portfolio savings obligations. The program managers evaluating their portfolios have walked this ground before: contractors who produce solid audit reports, collect signatures, and disappear before a single measure gets implemented; customers who enrolled once, took the rebate, and haven’t engaged since; opportunities that looked real in the treasure hunt and sat in the pipeline for two years. That pattern is familiar. So is the consequence — incremental savings goals that depend on C&I performance in a sector where sustained engagement is harder to procure than the initial site visit.
We’ve spent decades figuring out why implementation stalls and what actually moves it, across thousands of C&I sites across the U.S. We’ve been walking plant floors, pulling interval data, sitting across from maintenance supervisors who’ve heard every energy pitch in the book and are deeply unimpressed by all of them. And here’s what that experience has taught us: the untapped sustainability potential inside C&I operations is extraordinary, and it’s reachable through operational expertise and long-term relationships built on trust, not one-and-done capital projects.
Here’s a field report from people who genuinely love this work.
Commercial and industrial facilities account for more than 50% of U.S. electricity consumption and carry a proportionally significant share of the nation’s carbon footprint. Yet systematic energy performance improvement in those facilities has barely scratched the surface of what’s achievable in the realm of operational savings like equipment running on inherited settings, systems scheduled for production patterns that changed years ago, or compressed air leaks written off as the cost of doing business. The savings have simply been underdeveloped.
The gap between facilities with rigorous SEM programs and those without isn’t primarily a capital problem. It’s an expertise problem. Most C&I customers lack the internal bandwidth to conduct the systematic, cross-system analysis that surfaces where operational energy waste actually lives. Strategic Energy Management closes that gap by building the organizational capability to continuously identify, implement, and sustain improvements across the full energy portfolio.
The evidence base for what Strategic Energy Management produces in C&I facilities is substantial. 17,000 energy measures tracked across 14 SEM programs and 425 industrial sites revealed that the median first-year electricity savings per participant is approximately 270,000 kWh, or roughly 3% of baseline consumption. A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study of SEM programs across U.S. industrial facilities found average savings of 10%, with some facilities reaching 30%. The Institute for Industrial Productivity puts achievable manufacturing savings at up to 15%, with payback periods under two years.
These outcomes come from non-capital operational adjustments that most facilities have never examined. At Gills Onions an initial SEM target of 10% energy reduction gave way to a 26% reduction over four years, equating to 3,786,000 kWh of annual savings, $1,020,000 in avoided energy costs, and $54,000 in utility incentives. The largest single contributor: six 50-horsepower pressure cooler fans that had been running continuously as part of standard operations, regardless of whether any product was in front of them. No capital required. A behavioral change identified during a site walkthrough now saves approximately 1.2 million kWh and $259,000 per year.
A commercial bakery was already generating 25% of its energy from solar when it joined an SEM program and implemented 44 projects over four years, including VFD optimization, compressor discharge pressure adjustments, and setpoint controls, achieving a 10% annual electricity reduction and more than $120,000 per year in energy cost savings. For a facility already committed to sustainability, SEM multiplied that commitment. Neither facility required major capital investment, merely the know-how and expertise of where to look.
On average, SEM participants identify 40 energy-saving measures per site and complete 16 of them. That means 24 scoped, documented, achievable opportunities per facility sit in the pipeline right now, identified and waiting. For utilities and their C&I partners, each of those uncompleted measures represents unrealized energy savings, unrealized carbon reductions, and unrealized operational efficiency. The barrier is rarely feasibility. It’s sustained engagement.
Completion timing follows a predictable pattern: analysis of those 17,000 measures shows 82% of completed measures finish within one year of the site walkthrough where they were identified, with the fastest implementation pace in the first 100 days. Sustained engagement intensity in the first months after a treasure hunt produces dramatically higher capture rates. Programs that maintain that cadence don’t just find opportunities; they develop the pathways that ensure those opportunities persist and capital projects prioritized.
Persistence is what separates strong SEM programs from transactional energy audits. SEM participants carry approximately 75% of their incremental first-year savings into year two because the improvements are embedded in facility operations, those cost savings are often invested in capital energy saving projects.
There’s a compounding effect here that matters for program design. C&I facilities that have been through a rigorous SEM engagement become organizational energy leaders. They share results with peer facilities. They present at industry association meetings. They call their utility contact before making capital decisions, rather than after. One well-developed anchor customer in a sector can unlock access to a cohort of similar facilities that a cold outreach program would spend years trying to reach. The network effect changes the recruitment math entirely when existing participants are championing the work.
Here is the genuinely optimistic version of the energy story: global electricity demand grew 4.4% in 2024 and is projected to grow at roughly the same pace in both 2025 and 2026, well above the 2.6% average from 2015 to 2023. Data center buildouts, industrial electrification, and EV charging infrastructure are all adding large new loads to C&I facilities, and every one of those new loads is an entry point for SEM engagement.
A manufacturer that electrifies a process this year is one whose new energy schedule has never been evaluated through an SEM lens. An industrial campus expanding its data center footprint has new loads, a new energy manager incentivized to perform, and no pre-existing relationship with a program that can help them optimize. Meeting these customers at the moment of change before inefficient patterns become the default is where SEM programs deliver their highest long-term value.
Utilities and program administrators that build strong C&I SEM programs before new loads calcify into unexamined operating procedures are the ones that will have the deepest, most trusted relationships with their largest customers. The capacity to help C&I customers meet both efficiency and sustainability goals arrives alongside the load growth that creates the need for it.
Fifteen years of SEM program design and implementation across 1,175-plus C&I sites in 27 states and provinces has produced a consistent finding: the energy savings utilities need to meet efficiency goals and the sustainability outcomes C&I customers need to meet their own commitments are both inside the commercial and industrial facilities already on the grid. The barriers are operational: equipment settings never revisited, production schedules never evaluated through an energy lens, audited opportunities that were identified years ago and never acted on.
Programs built around onsite expertise, interval data infrastructure, and sustained customer engagement convert that inventory into documented, durable savings. They build internal capability that outlasts the program engagement itself. When C&I customers know exactly what they’ve changed, how much it’s worth, and that an expert will help them sustain it, energy management looks less like a compliance exercise and more like a competitive advantage.
The data is there, the methodology is proven, and to us, discovering is the exciting part. We’re glad to show you what it can unlock in your territory.
