Best Practices for Energy Savings

Increasing energy costs are one of the recurring items on the list of what keeps elevator and mill managers awake at night. Supply disruptions caused by hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and recent hikes in energy prices, are having an impact on everyone in the United States, including the nation's industrial

You can find further BestPractices and resources at their website: www.oit.doe.gov/bestpractices/

The following six Action Plan Steps give you a chance to see what the program can help you do at your feed mill or grain elevator.

Action Plan Step 1: Track Energy Bills

Your first step is to determine how much you pay for energy at your facility. This will give you the baseline from which to measure your overall progress and allow you to calculate cost savings from specific energy-saving measures. Get the energy bills for electricity, natural gas, and fuel oil for the last year and determine your total annual energy costs by fuel type and 2) your perunit energy costs (in the appropriate units).

A useful resource for this exercise is the Self-Assessment Workbook for Small Manufacturers, available from Rutgers University, Office of Industrial Productivity and Energy Assessment.

Action Plan Step 2: Identify Big Uses

The next step is to identify the equipment that uses the most energy in your plant. In many plants, a minority of the equipment accounts for the majority of energy consumption. Things to look for include large pieces of equipment and equipment that runs most of the time or that has periodic, but substantial, startup energy requirements (such as a bank of electric motors). A typical equipment list at a manufacturing plant will include machinery in the following categories:

* Natural gas

* Heating/cooling/ventilating equipment (e.g., infrared heaters, hot water heaters, steam boilers)

* Production equipment (e.g., steam boilers, process heaters)

* Electricity

* Air compressors

* Heating/cooling/ventilating equipment (e.g., rooftop heat pumps and air conditioners)

* Production equipment (e.g., motor-driven equipment, pumps, fans)

* Fuel oil

* Heating/cooling/ventilating equipment (e.g., steam boilers)

Action Plan Step 3: Identify Low-cost Projects

Now that you know how much energy is being used and what pieces of equipment are your likely "energy drains," check out the list of top-20 best practices to see which of these might apply to you. Get rapid returns by identifying and implementing some of these quick and easy projects.

Best Practices for All Combustion Systems

* Operate furnaces and boilers at or close to design capacity

* Reduce excess air

* Clean heat transfer surfaces

* Reduce radiation losses from openings

* Use proper furnace or boiler insulation to reduce wall heat losses

* Adequately insulate air or water-cooled surfaces exposed to the furnace environment and steam lines leaving the boiler

* Install heat recovery equipment

Best Practices for Steam Generation Systems

* Improve water treatment to minimize boiler blow-down

* Optimize deaerator vent rate

* Repair steam leaks

* Minimize vented steam

* Implement effective steam trap maintenance program

* Use high pressure condensate to make low pressure steam

* Utilize back-pressure turbine instead of pressure release valves

* Optimize condensate recovery

Best Practices for Process Heating Systems

* Minimize air leakage into the furnace by sealing openings

* Maintain proper, slightly positive furnace pressure

* Reduce weight of or eliminate material handling fixtures

* Modify the furnace system or use a separate heating system to recover furnace exhaust gas heat

* Recover part of the furnace exhaust heat for use in lower temperature processes

Action Plan Step 4: Get Management Support

Management support is an essential ingredient of the action plan - it will allow you to be proactive in going after opportunities and getting the training you need to identify and make , improvements. For projects that require a capital investment or significant changes to current operating practices (i.e., "habits"), you'll have to do some convincing. The first three steps of this action plan will have given you some good data to grab the attention of your management and co-workers. At this stage, your goal is to show the value of energy-saving measures and the potential cost and productivity advantages of a more aggressive energy efficiency program.

Action Plan Step 5: Form an Energy Team

Energy teams in manufacturing facilities track and report energy use, identify energy-saving opportunities, develop an energy plan and implement cost-saving measures. Energy teams typically include members from plant and process engineering, maintenance engineering, procurement and production. The teams may have anywhere from two to two dozen members. Any energy team will enjoy greater success with support and involvement from senior managers, who can remove barriers and commit resources to projects.

Performing a formal energy assessment is one of the best ways that your team can develop a cost-effective plan to lower plant energy costs. The energy assessment team (which sometimes includes outside experts in energy management and troubleshooting) works both during and after the assessment process to

* Evaluate all of the industrial systems to calculate how and where your plant uses energy;

* Help find opportunities to increase efficiency;

* Determine potential upgrades and emerging technologies that might work for your plant; and

* Implement cost-saving measures.

DOE experience indicates a typical plant can realize annual energy cost savings of 10-20% following a thorough plant-wide assessment.

Action Plan Step 6: Develop a Strategy

The final step is to create a strategy for sustaining plantwide efforts to improve and maintain the efficiency of your energy systems. Keep staff motivated to achieve the thousands or millions of dollars in cost savings that are achievable at your plant through monthly or bimonthly meetings of the energy team, tracking and reporting on your energy and cost savings, spotbonus awards for involved staff, periodic reassessments of equipment and opportunities, and replicating your team's assessment methodology in other plants.