Critically for any company seeking ongoing energy savings or reducing its CO2 consumption, buy-in is imperative at a corporate level and needs to be backed up by empowerment of the personnel who are going to implement any strategy or be responsible for achieving targets.
“The ISO 500001 approach is good,” says Matt Harris of EECO2. “It gets people identifying where energy is being used and then they can prioritise. What we look for is where the greatest savings can be made: refrigeration plant, process heating, control optimisation, space heating or cooling, and then supporting services: ventilation, lighting, compressed air etc.
“It’s ideal if a company has ISO 50001 metering in place for electricity, gas, steam and water usage, so that we can see what points in a system are using the most energy so that the major energy consumers can be targeted. Changing lights to energy efficient lighting can be the most visible activity, for example, but if your lights only account for 5% of your energy use, they may not be the best first place to start. You need to map what your significant users of energy are; what uses it and when, and ascertain whether use is related to production.”
Matt explains that, for example, if a site typically consumes X units of energy per 1,000 litres of product, and if that ratio of energy consumption per unit doesn’t increase significantly when production capacity is increased, it indicates that there are energy consuming processes running constantly in the background that are not linked to production output. A typical illustration of this would be ovens used for drying product in a powdered beverage plant that are not turned off between batches.
“It may have been perceived historically that drying ovens don’t need to be switched off,” he says. “The quality control department now doesn’t want to risk production by opting to switch the ovens off because a negative impact on output could outweigh any potential savings in energy. The engineering department, meanwhile, may already know that this would be very effective, but the two teams may not communicate effectively to enable such actions and savings to be realised.
“The potential savings in such an area can be significant, and a technical solution can be reasonably straightforward when you get the right people talking to each other. So, getting outside involvement can trigger the expertise within the organisation itself.”
Harris suggests that it’s often the case with energy efficiency projects that companies have energy managers, but their role becomes so stretched that they don’t have the time or resource to fulfil their role effectively.
“Some companies are guilty of putting in metering technology in order to obtain energy data, but that data comes in to someone’s desk whose day is already full,” he says. “Understanding and acting on the data is key, so people need the resource and time to dedicate to energy management. Those firms with commitment from a high level stand more chance of making savings.”
Obtaining company-wide and senior management buy-in, although fundamental, relies heavily on the potential cost savings to be made. Harris points out that there are easy pitfalls for companies when assessing energy savings, and stresses that looking at low- or no-cost savings is vital before large capital expenditure is made. He cites one plant that opted first to invest in combined heat & power (CHP) technology.
“Any company wants to assess the payback for any proposed energy saving project,” says Harris. “But, if you have a poorly performing facility and you put in a CHP plant without doing anything else, you will save on utility bills, but are subsequently calculating against a cheaper electricity supply when assessing potential energy savings for any other project. Payback is therefore far worse for efficiency measures than if the assessment had been made prior to investment in the CHP plant, and savings could also have resulted in investment in a smaller capacity CHP to meet the reduced requirements.”
He also stresses that correct implementation of any capital investment is vital: “If you invest in automatic monitoring and targeting involving energy meters placed within the facility, feeding data into energy monitoring software, you need to be sure that any alerts are monitored effectively and acted upon,” he says. “If all you do is install software and meters and the information just sits somewhere on someone’s computer without resources being allocated to make use of the data, you would readily conclude that the investment was a waste of money.
“Ultimately, you need ongoing and dedicated management support to improve your energy performance, and done well, it will easily pay for itself. Companies manage their finance or production efficiency – now energy is part of that same discipline. You need ongoing commitment.”
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