Demand Charges are added to your electric bill when your power use spikes, even for only a few minutes at a time. You can easily end up paying hundreds of dollars more than your neighbor for power, even if you used less energy overall.
There's a way to avoid this, without having to change your business operations.
High-capacity on-site battery systems have dropped in cost more than 40% in the last few years. You can take advantage of this by installing a high-cap battery in front of your high-power, intermittently-used machinery. The battery supplies power rapidly to your equipment then recharges slowly from the grid, and your utility never sees a spike. Then your bill never sees a demand charge.
Many New England utilities including Eversource and NStar offer incentives and rebates for you to install battery storage systems like this. They'll even pay you to join a VPP Demand Response program. You can get paid to help stabilize the grid.