Energy Reduction / Management
For the medium-term, it’s vital to develop an Energy Efficiency Plan, which does not need to be complicated or expensive. The key is in understanding precisely how you use energy and how you are charged for it by your suppliers. Power bills are frequently obscure and their underlying calculations are complex.
There are many ways to reduce energy consumption in almost any facility. Over time, equipment designs are modified and operations change as personnel come and go. Because your staff are so used to seeing things in a particular light, they don’t notice gradual depreciation in equipment performance.
Applied Energy has “fresh eyes” and will help you identify and prioritize those energy-consuming systems with the greatest potential savings and/or the fastest paybacks (typically less than 2 years).
We focus on the 6 largest energy uses within most facilities.
Energy-efficiency projects always involve trade-offs between cost, available savings and production constraints, but we can provide you with the tools to make informed decisions. It’s usually possible to identify projects that can deliver overall energy savings of 20-40% of a facility’s current energy consumption, often with paybacks of 2 to 3 years.
While larger investments are frequently required to achieve larger savings, there are some exceptions to this general rule; significant savings can often be obtained with relatively minor modifications to operating schedules, and some lower-cost projects can yield surprisingly good results. (e.g. a Lighting Upgrade)
Lighting Upgrades
In almost every facility the quickest, most cost-effective method of reducing energy consumption by a significant amount - typically 10-20% of the total facility power bill - is to replace old, inefficient lighting (sodium vapor, metal halide or ‘T12’ fluorescent) with modern high-efficiency lighting – T8 or T5 fluorescent, induction lighting or LEDs.
Savings are considerable, the cost is reasonable when compared with other energy-saving projects, and interruption to production is minimal. In many cases lighting upgrades can be financed entirely from the resulting energy savings, with no out-of-pocket cost whatsoever.