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MT. STERLING, ILL. -- Ameren Illinois has a program available to their business customers where together the utility company and the business can work on a plan to reduce their energy costs and improve their energy efficiency.

DOT Foods in Mt. Sterling has teamed up with Ameren Illinois to develop a plan to cut energy costs and improve their energy efficiency. It's a program called Act On Energy offered by Ameren and through that it helps their business customers reduce the amount the natural gas and electricity they use in their facilities.

"Ameren really enabled us to bring the cost efficiency to let us bring the project to fruition. Often times the cost of newer technology is prohibitive without partnering, so their support was key to the whole process," said John Long who is the DOT Foods senior vice president of warehousing.

With the plan that was developed, DOT Foods installed energy efficient lighting, state of the art refrigeration systems and even changed their battery charger systems. All of the changes that were made, saw DOT's electricity usage cut by the amount equal to that used to power 400 residential homes for a year. That's something that pleases not only DOT Foods, but also Ameren.

Cheryl Miller is the ActOnEnergy business program manager for Ameren and she said, "You know once these businesses, once they make that first initial start and they find out that one, they really do get help paying for the energy efficient equipment and two they see on their bill that it really does save them energy and that saves them money. They will do projects. DOT Foods is a perfect example of that."

DOT said they it took them about nine months to implement all of the recommendations that were made. So far about 10 energy efficient projects have been complete, saving the company about 15 percent on their utility costs in one year and they said that because of the savings they saw in their dry foods warehouse, they're planning on utilizing the program for their frozen foods warehouse as well.