On energy costs at our sites:

It’s our second most controllable cost at our company . . . energy costs are usually around 6% or 7% of revenue. You have to look at utility bills. You have to get your arms around what you’re paying now [to make sure it] is right, [that] you’re not paying things in error and once you know that is your baseline, you can then start to look at other ways to reduce the demand-side management. We have, for example, once we understand our billing, gone in and sold the program to upper management. We just finished this month or last month actually replacing 150,000 100-watt bulbs in each room with 30-watt . . . fluorescence bulbs for a very good return on investment. They thought it was great. We’re seeing the return for us is working fine for us.

On return-on-investment goals:

Three-to-one is pretty much what we shoot for as an average, but one thing that Cadence is going to be able to bring to our table if we do a billing deal with them is water. I think you’re going to see a 15- to 17-to-1 return on investment. That’s what I typically saw when I was doing it. There’s a huge amount of errors in the billing that you can really save some money on. For every dollar I save, it’s probably four, five, six dollars in revenue that they don’t have to get. Our revenue last year was over $500 million and we spent $25 million on utilities so . . . we saved probably last year a million and a quarter off the bottom line. So you can just multiply that by five and it’s a pretty big number.