Business View Magazine | November 2019

214 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE NOVEMBER 2019 and state agencies and Manchester was a perfect example of how that could be done. “That was our first big project and we realized we could go a lot further,” says Veni. “We want to utilize any money available to us to fund any and all proposed energy projects. To date, we have received $162,000, by filling out grant applications to the BPU (Board of Public Utilities) and the NJ Clean Energy Program. If it wasn’t for that money, there would be a lot of projects we could not afford to do. We still don’t have solar – not that we didn’t believe in the technology - it just wasn’t the right time to spend large amounts of taxpayers’ money. As with any technology, we expected solar technology would quickly advance in performance while at the same time becoming more affordable. We stand by that decision, today. However, we were able to implement the sun tubes and make our lighting very efficient, which literally reduced our energy consumption by half.” Next on the agenda were waste oil heaters. Manchester has a big fleet of public works and police vehicles which equates to a significant stream of waste oil. Natural gas being unavailable in the area, the public works garage uses #2 diesel, which spurred the idea to use the waste oil to heat the garage as several mechanics are staffed within the building. Two heaters were installed, tested for a couple years, and they worked so well that two more were installed. Now, the facility runs solely on waste oil all winter; not only saving money from using #2 diesel to heat the building, but also reducing, reusing, and recycling the waste oil stream from Manchester’s vehicle fleet. “After that, we really started getting into this,” Veni recalls. “Clean Energy was offering to pay all of the associated costs of an energy audit, so we opted to have our first audit completed. When the results came back, it was very exciting to hear the auditor’s feedback, basically saying that some of our buildings are so far ahead that nothing else needed to be done, while others needed work. That led to a Direct Install Program, where we replaced