energy awareness – Enviro-Mentalist

Path of Resistance

Over the last few months the requirement to reduce our energy consumption at work has increased in the build up to the Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency scheme that launches on April 1st. Whilst I am trying to co-ordinate all the efforts of the group, I am also very aware that as the largest site in the group, I need to try to ensure that we are also making a concerted effort to improve efficiency.

For a bit of background, we are a site that operates 24/7, with two plants running most of the time, depending on customer demand – both do a slightly different job with, in the main, different customers, and are completely different in their mode of operation. One of these plants and associated peripherals and warehousing space etc is responsible for about 70% of the electricity consumption on site.

Whilst we have started to tackle the lights (more about this in a later post), I think we also need to start looking at the processing equipment itself. We have had a couple of surveys conducted on site, including one by the Carbon Trust, and both have mentioned the operating pressure of the two compressors that we have. (We actually have three, but the third is kept as a spare.) This is where the resistance has started. We have a maintenance team of four, and, unfortunately they have not bought in to the idea of using the CRCEE as a way of making any changes that they would like, and I think this is because they are too comfortable and don’t like the idea of change – I may be doing them a disservice, but I have yet to see any real evidence.

OK, now for a bit more background whilst I explain the issues at hand – sorry if you don’t find compressors overly exciting, feel free to skip to the conclusion. The compressors are of different types and are both operating all the time (although not on load). One is a variable speed drive (VSD) compressor which changes its power consumption to match the load, the other is either on or off load. The VSD compressor has apparently been specified to run both plants if necessary and the pipework is in place to allow us to do that. This compressor also has a fairly large receiver tank to store the compressed air and smooth out the load. The compressor kicks in when the pressure in the tank is below 7.5 bar and turns off at 8.5bar (this will become relevant as my story progresses).

So, first question, is the compressor operating in the most efficient way?

Mainenance – it was the most efficient compressor we could get at the time – the suppliers said so.

Me – but, is it running in the most efficient way? Is it set at the right pressure?

Maintenance – it has always been at that pressure since it was installed. It is a variable speed drive compressor and the most efficient available at the time.

Me (there is a pattern here) – but can we change the settings so it is operating more efficiently?

Maintenance – it turns off when it hits 9bar and only comes on when it is at 6bar (see, I told you it was relevant).

Herein lies my perennial problem – not only do I not get the answers to the question I asked, but when I do get an answer there is no guarantee that it is the correct answer. So, my question is, how much time do I spend trying to convince the maintenance team that this is a really good thing, that they don’t have a choice in the long run, that running production equipment inefficiently really is a waste of money and resources, and that they might actually enjoy having some projects out of the ordinary to work on instead of the routine stuff. The alternative is to go ahead and arrange for some of these things to happen and get them annoyed with me – something I am not afraid to do, but it is hardly conducive to future co-operation, although it would mean we do save energy sooner rather than later.

With regards to the compressor – I have found a solution which I shall tell you about in my next post.

Disclaimer – I am not claiming that all maintenance departments are this obstructive, we have other maintenance personnel within the Company that are leading the way, but I bet there is someone like this in most companies. Have you encountered similar problems, how did you deal with them?

Switch Off Campaign

A decision was made at Head Office that a switch off campaign sounded like a good idea, so we (the Carbon Reduction steering committee) were told to organise one in our respective division. So, that will be easy then. After some debate as to what constituted a switch off campaign with a leading light thinking that it would involve lots of surveys and the appointment of green champions to look for energy saving opportunities, I finally got them to see sense and realise that it was just what it said on the tin: a campaign to raise awareness and get everyone switching things off when they were not in use. Back to the real world and the rush of the every day job kicked in and I did not really think about the switch off campaign.

A month later a reminder came out with a start date of 4th January. OK, so now I have a deadline, but still no guidance. So, what to do? I could email the Site Managers and tell them to organize a switch off campaign – that would work! I turned once more to my trusty friend Google and found a couple of bits of information, mainly from local councils who had jointly run just such a scheme and used these as the starting point for my ideas.

The first thing I did was make an action plan for the actual campaign which was to be over a two week period:

Energy measurements to be taken at the same time each week for two weeks before, during and after the campaign.
Site Managers to brief all of the staff about the campaign
Site Managers to conduct a walk around the site during the campaign and provide positive and negative feedback to staff
Staff to be encouraged to submit energy saving ideas

etc, etc. The action plan was emailed out to the Site Managers a couple of weeks before the start to give them a little advance warning. I have found that each of the seven sites we have is very different in size and culture, and so, one size does not necessarily fit all, so the Site Managers were the best people to decide how to get local buy-in.

Next on my list was to create some advertising material, something that would remind staff about the campaign and why they should be turning things off. So, back to Mr Google for some more helpful hints and tips, followed by a trip to an online stock photo site for some appropriate pictures (yes, I know that one of my other passions is photography, but I was in a hurry and did not have the appropriate props). A couple of late nights later and I had a series of posters for display at the sites detailing environmental facts and energy saving tips. You can view them here:

SWITCH IT OFF

If you would like to use them please feel free to download – just let me know – it is always interesting to see where others are in their quest for energy efficiency as well as being good for the ego.

OK, so now I needed a bribe for the energy saving ideas bit. I settled on the promise of a tree planted in the name of the person with the best idea or a box of chocolates – should appeal to a lot of people I thought.

The campaign ran with mixed success, I will outline the reasons for this, along with the results, in my next post.

Lighting in Daventry.

A while ago (as outlined in Lighting – do we have too much?) I started to look at the amount of lighting on our Daventry site. For various reasons it has taken some time to make any meaningful changes, but at last we are beginning to make some progress.

Surprising discovery number one – we had no light switches for a quarter of our warehouse – even when no one was around we had to leave 3kW of lights on. Whilst this is only for a small proportion of the year it is still waste. The lights were controlled by a photocell, unfortunately somewhere along the line a Health & Safety survey had declared that the lighting was insufficient and, instead of changing the levels the detectors were covered up. This meant that other than tripping the circuit breakers, the lights could not be switched off; even on the brightest of days.

The first step was therefore to sort this ridiculous state of affairs out. We have now installed some new photocells which can be changed remotely if the initial levels are incorrectly set. The payback time on this is less than 12 months even if the light is only bright enough to switch them off for 4 hours each day. The only fly in this ointment is that H&S police have again determined that the light levels initially set were incorrect, and, rather than resetting to the correct levels, they have been turned to permanently on! A task for the next week will be to sort this problem out.

Other areas have been identified where lights are left on for no reason. Despite being only a few fluorescent tubes (relatively small in number compared to the aforementioned warehouse) they still represent substantial savings. The first of these areas was the Plant room – visited only by maintenance staff, and therefore it should have been better controlled. Unfortunately, unless you are in the room you can’t tell whether the lights have been left on; it was estimated that there were about 158 hours of extra lighting each week in this area.

The second area is a small office in the middle of the warehouse that has no permanent occupant and is subsequently visited by various members of staff, none of whom appears to be capable of turning the light off when they leave. This 200W of lighting is left on unnecessarily for about 144 hours every week. The answer to both of these has been the addition of PIRs (Passive Infra Red detectors) – motion detectors. I think that you can get too carried away with motion detectors and see them as the answer to everything, but in some cases, for example when there are lots of different occupants using a room, only some whom will regularly turn the light off, they can be beneficial. Both of these projects had estimated payback times of less than 12 months.

The final change that has been made has been a no cost solution and is the most obvious. A member of the maintenance team was asked to survey the lighting of the entire site and, in addition to the number, type and power of the lights, estimate hours of use and the amount of wastage. As a consequence it occurred to him that one of the areas was visited for approximately 1 hour per week but that all three of the 70W tubes were on permanently. He was usually the only one to visit the room and has now promised to turn the lights off when the room is not in use, a saving of 1800kWh per year.

Other areas have been singled out as needing a motion detector – these include the toilets, the tea room and the locker room, but I am having less success in getting these fitted – it is starting to become a bit of a mission!

I have now started to look at the rest of the sites within the business unit as part of the requirements for our participation in the Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency scheme (CRCEE) and have learnt more about lighting than I ever expected. Details to follow..

Conducting an Internal Energy Audit.

I decided that following on from the surveys conducted by external agencies, I should start doing regular audits / walkrounds of the site. The aim is to find ways of saving energy and money as well as checking the general housekeeping of the site. I had downloaded some guides from the Carbon Trust website, but, as with so many things in life, never got round to reading them. I had a browse through them today, but found nothing profound and so came up with the following plan:

1. Divide the warehouse into 5 main areas; main office, warehouses, plant control rooms, other occupied areas (such as tea room, other offices, maintenance workshop) and the outside. ( I will freely admit, I left the outside for another week as it was raining.)

2. Look at lighting, heating or cooling, appliances and good or bad practices.

3. Create a sheet for each area with sections for comments and observations of things for further investigation. I will see how these work out and change them if I feel the need.

OK, nothing earth shattering there, but the Carbon Trust didn’t have any better ideas. I am going to try to do a walk round at different times (today was lunchtime) including weekends, and obviously, at different times of the year.

So, the survey. I have been round the site quite a few times in the last 10 years, so was not sure I would find many unexpected things. Unfortunately, as expected the main issues I found were all down to employees’ inability to switch anything off!

Every light within a 10 mile radius of the plant seemed to be on (OK, slight exaggeration, I had turned my office light off) – in fact I only found a couple of areas where the lights weren’t a-blazin’. How many people were working in the plant rooms – zero. In fact, in one of the areas someone from the maintenance team suggested motion detectors to control the lights because they were incapable of turning them off!

In terms of heating and cooling, I wasn’t expecting too many issues as the temperature was mild but only in the low 20s outside. So I found one large portable cooling unit left on whilst everyone was on lunch, a fan going in the plant room which no one occupies unless they are doing maintenance and, almost as worryingly, the air conditioning on in the conference room – I don’t think there had been any meetings in there for at least a week!

Appliances – no surprises here. It seems as though each indivdual had their own radio – I came across at least 7 and only two of them were near anyone who was working. Other than the radios, there were computers not in use that were left on, and torches left on charge.

So, nothing major that I could find on a quick survey, and, nothing, that couldn’t be changed, it justs needs some employee engagement, timers and power down adapters for docking stations (oh, and some motion detectors and a big stick!).

I do have a number of other things that I need to understand better such as water purifiers and compressors which are on all the time, whether we need them or not, as well as the health and safety implications of adding in motion detectors in parts of the building. My next step though is to quantify the potential savings and relate them to profits – after all, £25 a year wasted by leaving a photocopier on doesn’t sound like much does it?

Lighting – do we have too much?

As mentioned in a recent article, we have had a couple of surveys conducted on the site, and both immediately singled out lighting as an area where we can cut our expenditure / consumption. This is an obvious place to look really as we are a large warehouse with a lot of lights.

As a brief intro, we essentially have 5 warehouse areas built over the last 20 years or so, of different heights, lit by fluorescent tubes for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week; such is our working pattern. In addition, we have a few office areas that are, in the main, occupied only during office hours.

Whilst I will admit there is plenty we can do to cut our lighting bill, I think those auditing the site are under the impression that it is a bigger problem than the data actually suggests. The Carbon Trust report estimated that lighting accounted for 27% of our electricity consumption, and this is what I have discovered to date.

We have over 500 tubes of varying sizes on site.
If a room lit by fluorescent tubes is unoccupied for more than 9 minutes it is more energy efficient to turn the light off.
Getting people into the habit of turning off lights when leaving a room is difficult, but not impossible – I deem this a work in progress.
Two of our warehouses which were built in the last 10 years were fitted with daylight sensors – these warehouses have higher roofs and are generally lighter.
These sensors are in an unsuitable place, and in failing to control the lighting acceptably they have been covered up.
There are no light switches for these warehouses; the lights are on all day, every day.
Indoor lighting is responsible for approximately 11% of our consumption, with outdoor lighting on a sensor and adding about another 0.5-1%.

As stated at the beginning, there are measures we can take, but at only 11% of consumption, they will have a limited effect. I will update you with the results of these efforts at reducing our lighting bill in a later post.

Energy Awareness at Work

One of the major problems highlighted as part of our energy audit was employee awareness of energy wastage. This was obvious just on the walk around when the number of lights and computers left on was visible to anyone with their eyes open. As a consequence, we were offered several one hour training sessions to try to raise the awareness of staff about the cost of leaving things switched on. This was sold to us on the basis that most people, even advocates of energy saving, don’t even think about saving energy at work and are often unaware of just how much leaving some devices on standby could be costing.

So, I organised three sessions for all the employees on site that day, and was impressed to see that everyone did turn up for the sessions. Only one person asked if they could miss it (I obviously said no as they are the biggest sceptic that I know and believe that climate change is just a government scare tactic to introduce more taxes). I also (admittedly a bit belatedly) sent an email to other departments and sites inviting them to send someone over if they wanted (I had only one response, and everyone else ignored me) – this is obviously not currently a priority within the Company – although I believe this may be about to change with the requirements for the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC).

How did the training go? Well, it was not the most dynamic of deliveries I have ever come across. There were some interesting facts and figures about the cost of leaving appliances on standby, which did seem to be news to some people in the room, but other than that there did not seem to be very much content and certainly nothing that I thought would influence many people to change their habits. There was also a large concentration of effort about the Carbon Reduction Commitment, despite my assurances that there really was nothing that I could do about it at my lowly level. Maybe I was a little prejudiced though, because it wasn’t news to me, but apparently some people did not know that leaving their mobile on charge for longer than required was wasting money.

So, results of the training, no immediate effects were noticeable, although it did get some people talking about it. I have since discovered that more warehouse staff are turning lights off as they leave the room (I discovered this second hand due to a comment from maintenance that they are having to replace more bulbs). Most disappointing though is that people in the office are still leaving lights and IT equipment on – one of our biggest wastes of energy. So, although it did not change the world, it was probably worthwhile as it did what it said on the tin and raised employee awareness with regards to energy usage – now it is up to me to start getting them into new, better habits.