Slash demand charges, power production from your own roof
For commercial and industrial sites, the enemy is not just the energy rate — it is the demand charge. NexusCore engineers C&I solar and storage to clip peaks, shift load and turn your roofline into a hedge against rising network costs.
Commercial and industrial electricity bills are dominated by two line items most operators barely understand: the energy charge and the demand charge. The demand charge — billed on your single highest 15 or 30 minute interval each month — can account for a third or more of the total. NexusCore C&I solar attacks both. We deploy rooftop, carport or ground-mount arrays sized to your daytime production load, then layer storage and controls that deliberately shave those costly demand peaks before the network meter ever sees them.
The engineering starts with your interval data and tariff structure. Manufacturing, cold storage and warehousing each have radically different load shapes, and a system that ignores those shapes leaves money on the table. We map when your machines draw hardest, where solar can directly offset process load, and where a battery should discharge to keep your peak demand under the threshold that triggers punishing network charges.
Where the savings come from
- Direct offset of daytime process load with high-yield commercial panels
- Demand-charge reduction through targeted battery peak-shaving
- Load-shifting of flexible processes into solar-surplus hours
- Power-factor correction and quality improvements at the connection point
- Bankable ROI modelling with depreciation and tariff escalation built in
Peak-demand arbitrage and BESS
A battery energy storage system on a C&I site is not a backup gadget — it is a financial instrument. By charging from solar surplus or cheap off-peak grid energy and discharging during peak-tariff or peak-demand windows, a BESS performs continuous arbitrage. With modern LFP chemistry delivering round-trip efficiencies around 90 per cent and cycle lives well beyond 6,000 cycles, the system pays for itself by harvesting the spread between your cheapest and most expensive kilowatt-hours, month after month.
Resilience and grid services
Beyond bill reduction, storage turns your site into a resilient, grid-aware asset. During outages, a correctly configured BESS keeps critical lines energised, protecting product and avoiding costly downtime. And as AEMO opens more markets to distributed resources, aggregated commercial batteries can earn revenue from frequency control and demand-response programs — converting a cost centre into a contributor to grid stability.
Every C&I site is different, so we never quote from a catalogue. Send us twelve months of interval data and your current tariff, and our team will return a feasibility study covering array sizing, demand-charge savings, BESS strategy and full payback economics. Request your commercial feasibility study and start turning your network charges into avoided cost.
Commercial & Industrial Solar questions
Solar alone trims energy consumption, but demand charges are set by your single highest interval. We pair generation with a battery that discharges precisely during your peak windows, keeping recorded demand below the threshold that triggers high network rates. That peak-shaving is often where the largest and most predictable savings on a C&I bill actually come from.
Most well-designed C&I systems land in the three to seven year range, depending on tariff structure, demand profile and whether storage is included. Sites with high daytime load and steep demand charges pay back fastest. Our feasibility study models your exact numbers including depreciation, so you see a bankable return rather than a generic estimate.
No. Commercial installs are staged around your production schedule, with most work completed on the roof or in dedicated plant areas while you operate normally. Final grid connection requires a brief coordinated shutdown, which we plan well in advance and typically execute outside business hours to eliminate downtime.
Increasingly, yes. As AEMO expands access to frequency control and demand-response markets, aggregated commercial batteries can be enrolled to provide grid services and earn additional income. We design BESS systems to be eligible for these programs, so your storage can stack savings with grid-services revenue over its lifetime.
Let's power your independence
Transparent modelling, accredited engineering and storage that pays for itself — start with a free NexusCore energy model.