Building a Strong Partnership: Whirltronics & the City of Buffalo
At Whirltronics Inc, we value our partnership with the City of Buffalo, MN. As one of Buffalo’s largest utility customers, using significant amounts of both water and electricity, having reliable utilities is crucial for our business. Our close collaboration ensures that we maintain top performance while contributing positively to the community.
Our Partnership with the City of Buffalo
The collaboration with the city has helped us achieve significant milestones in energy efficiency and community involvement. The efforts we’ve made has been instrumental in conserving resources and saving on utilities.
Our relationship with Buffalo has included several key projects:
- 2015: Expanded our buildings to accommodate growth
- 2018: Installation of a secondary electrical service to improve reliability
- 2019: Expanded our buildings to accommodate growth (again!)
- 2020: Upgraded our lighting to be more energy-efficient
- 2020-21: Implemented waste water reduction projects
- 2023: Focused on energy efficiency improvements
Community Involvement
The commitment to our partnership goes beyond utilities. We’re actively involved in local events and organizations. This past June, we partnered with the Buffalo Utility Department to host an event during Buffalo Days. We’re also planning another community event for 2025, showing our ongoing support for Buffalo. Stay tuned for details on this event in a future blog post!
Conservation and Energy Efficiency Efforts
At the start of 2023, we set a goal to improve our energy efficiency by reducing our monthly utility usage by 5%. To achieve this, we worked with the City of Buffalo, who arranged a third-party audit to assess our energy use.
This audit revealed several areas for improvement, and we made changes based on those recommendations. Here’s what we accomplished:
Electricity Reduction:
- 2022 to 2023: We cut our electricity use by 17.1%.
- 2023 to 2024: We achieved a further reduction of 4.4%.
To put this into perspective, in 2022 we used an average of 838,300 kWh of electricity per month. As of now, this has dropped to 656,000 kWh per month.
Water Usage Reduction:
- 2022 to 2023: We reduced our water use by 3.7%.
- 2023 to 2024: We made a significant cut of 40.2%.
Financial Support and Grants
During our energy improvement process, we also worked with Buffalo and its utility consultants to apply for grants. We were approved for eight rebates from Buffalo and Minnesota utility entities, totaling $41,455 in 2023/24. This support helped offset some of the costs of our energy-saving initiatives.
Looking Forward
Our partnership with the City of Buffalo is essential to the success of Whirltronics today and beyond. We’re excited about continuing our collaboration to enhance energy efficiency and support our community. Thank you to Buffalo for being a fantastic partner in our journey towards better utility management and community involvement. Here’s to many more years of working together and achieving great results!