Would your company hire 2nd plant manager with a 12-month annual vacation contract? Simple, eh? What about - Will your company invest into energy project with zero return? When company decides to delay an energy cost reduction project ... Wait, nobody makes such decisions. Sophisticated managers of 21st century decide that "energy cost reduction project [...]
In Energy Management the key word is management, not energy. So, all rules of management apply. Rule #1: it all starts from the top. This rules determines everything. 1. Effective Energy Management must have a C-level champion Practically speaking, if none of the top guns cares about energy management or at least energy efficiency, nothing [...]
An industrial bakery has installed new efficient compressor with VFD. The announcement reported that new compressor saved an estimated 147,600 kWh per year and brought $18,600 in incentives. Calculation of incentive used prescriptive approach. Should the company has taken a custom track in incentive application the incentive could have been way higher. Our analysis based on utility [...]
My friend Andrew once learned that he was paying twice as much for electricity than his neighbour across the street. Similar house, similar family, similar lifestyle, same utility ... but neighbour paid $200 a month, while Andrew paid $400. So Andrew decided to tackle the issue. He invited a utility rep to do a walk [...]
An old engineering joke says that if it moves, but should not - use duct tape, if does not move, but should - WD-40. Though every joke contains a joke, this formula can be applied to a walk through energy audit: engineering knowledge and common sense will go a long way in identifying low hanging fruits [...]
Simple energy metrics can be useless or worse Our client, an industrial bakery, monitored natural gas burned in the oven in m3 per kg of shipped bread. A fair metric, right? Just read the meter, take production report, divide consumption by production - done. They have got nowhere with this metric when it came to [...]
A new online program has been launched by University of Denver Colorado. It's been reported that over 33,000 students from around the world have enrolled. The course is offered free of charge through Coursera. The Fundamentals of Global Energy Business course provides students with an introduction to the business of primary energy production. The class examines the [...]
Steam is one of the most expensive forms of energy at most manufacturing plants. Powerful boilers produce lots and lots of it. Surely a couple of small leaks cost next to nothing, right? Here is a simple way to assess what damage a leak makes to the bottom line. Idea of this post came from [...]
Renewable sources of electricity may be not consistent, but they are highly predictable. Smartly combining them through a smart grid with efficiency measures makes it possible to compensate intermittence effectively. On the other hand, traditional sources of electricity, like coal and nuclear, have 10-12% downtime, which may happen unpredictably. Just to put things into perspective: [...]
This post continues our mini-series Learning from the Big - interviews with energy managers of big manufacturers with operations in Ontario, Canada. I spoke with Andrew Hejnar, Energy Manager at 3M Canada. What is the history of energy efficiency at 3M? First Energy Group at 3M (USA) was formed in 1974, by the mid-70s a position of [...]
