How Solar-Plus-Storage Helps Control Demand Charges for Food & Beverage Companies

Food and beverage facilities run on tight timelines and tighter tolerances. Production lines can’t stall. Cold storage temperatures can’t drift. Dock schedules don’t pause because the power grid has a bad day. Yet many facilities teams face a monthly line item that feels unpredictable even when operations are steady: demand charges.

In many utility territories, demand charges penalize sites not for how much electricity they use overall, but for how high their power draw spikes during peak intervals. In food and beverage operations — where refrigeration, freezing, HVAC, compressed air, conveyors, and process loads overlap — those spikes can happen quickly, often as a byproduct of normal operating behavior.

This is where solar-plus-storage becomes more than a sustainability upgrade. Done right, it’s a practical facility tool that helps you shape load, reduce expensive peaks, and stabilize energy costs all without compromising throughput, temperature control, or food safety.

How Demand Charges Impact Food & Beverage

Food and beverage sites are among the heaviest energy users in commercial and industrial operations for a reason: the work is energy-intensive. Cold storage and refrigeration loads must run continuously, and many facilities operate multiple shifts or even 24/7 to meet production targets and distribution commitments.

The challenge is that utility billing isn’t just about total kilowatt-hours. For many sites, a large share of the bill is driven by the highest measured demand, often set by short periods of elevated load. And in food and beverage operations, peak events aren’t rare outliers. They’re often triggered by everyday patterns, such as:

• Simultaneous equipment startups at shift changes or after planned downtime
• Refrigeration defrost cycles stacking with other loads
• Seasonal cooling and hot-weather surges that push refrigeration systems harder
• Motor-driven load ramps across compressors, conveyors, and material handling equipment

The result is that a facility can run “normally” and still get hit with demand charges that feel disconnected from operational choices.

Mitigating Demand Charges and Other Energy Cost Drivers With Solar-Plus-Storage

Solar-plus-storage pairs onsite solar generation with battery energy storage so facilities can manage when and how energy is used, not just how it’s produced. Solar helps offset utility consumption with predictable, low-cost onsite generation while storage extends that value by giving facilities a controllable resource to respond to peaks and price windows.

In the food and beverage context, storage-enabled strategies are especially relevant because they target the exact pain points facilities teams encounter: volatile bills and peak exposure. Here are the core strategies that matter most.

1. Peak Shaving: Reducing Demand Charges Without Affecting Production

Peak shaving is the most direct way batteries help cut demand charges. Instead of pulling entirely from the grid, the battery discharges during short peak windows to keep demand below a threshold. This can be especially valuable when spikes come from brief overlaps that are operationally difficult or impractical to avoid.

Examples where peak shaving can help in food and beverage facilities include:

• Multiple compressors starting around the same time
• Conveyor systems ramping while refrigeration loads are already high
• Stacked loads during hot afternoons when cooling demand increases
• Short intervals where several motor-driven systems hit peak output together

The operational appeal is simple in that you’re not relying on manual interventions or telling teams to “be careful not to spike demand.” The battery is doing the smoothing for you.

2. Solar Shifting: Using Onsite Generation When You Need It Most

Food and beverage sites often have long operating hours and frequent ramps, especially distribution and logistics facilities that run through peak shipping windows. Facilities commonly see load spikes during:

• Evening production shifts
• Early-morning equipment ramp-ups and pre-cooling cycles
• Hot-weather intervals when refrigeration loads surge

Solar shifting reduces exposure to demand charges during these events by capturing surplus solar generation (when production exceeds load) and storing it in the battery. That stored energy can then support operations later in the day, helping reduce reliance on the grid during higher-demand, higher-cost periods.

3. Energy Arbitrage: Stabilizing Costs Under Time-of-Use Pricing

In addition to demand charger, many food and beverage operators are also subject to time-of-use (TOU) rates, where electricity prices rise and fall throughout the day based on grid conditions. Customers can expect to pay a higher per-kilowatt rate during period of peak use, commonly during the early evening hours and during the summer.

Batteries enable a strategy called energy arbitrage by charging when electricity is cheaper (or when solar is abundant) and discharging during expensive windows. For facilities teams, this isn’t about chasing market prices minute by minute; it’s about reducing exposure to predictable high-cost periods that can destabilize budgets.

The benefit is both financial and practical:

• Lower cost during expensive TOU windows
• More consistent monthly bills
• Better ability to forecast and defend energy budgets

In a sector where margins are tight and pricing pressure is constant, stabilizing energy spend is a meaningful operational advantage.

Maximizing Solar-Plus-Storage Cost Savings With PowerFlex

A solar array and a battery energy storage system are powerful cost-saving assets, but they’re only as good as your energy management system. A proper EMS can:

• Detect peak conditions in real time
• Dispatch storage to cap demand without disrupting operations
• Coordinate solar generation and battery charging/discharging to maximize savings
• Provide ongoing visibility into performance, savings, and emissions reductions

At PowerFlex, we combine best-in-class solar and storage hardware with a dynamic software platform: PowerFlex X™. It’s more than just an energy management system; it’s a complete cleantech platform that monitors, controls, and optimizes your energy assets as a unified system to maximize performance and manage costs.

Contact a PowerFlex expert to learn more about what solar and storage with PowerFlex X can do for your organization.