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In recent years the cost of energy, whether supplied as gas, oil or electricity has risen at an alarming rate. More effective management of the use of energy can provide your business with opportunities for large savings as well as reducing your carbon footprint and help to slow down the rate of carbon dioxide generation.
Where do I begin?
Many sites only measure energy consumption at the point of delivery to the site, where it is recorded for bill paying purposes. What happens to the energy after that is largely a mystery!
A site-wide, or even process-wide, energy balance will help you to understand where your largest uses of energy are, from which you can begin to identify target areas for your improvement programme. Identifying ways to balance energy inputs against areas where waste heat is being generated can yield some considerable energy savings.
For example, have you considered using the waste heat from your boiler plant to pre-heat the input air to the burners? This can greatly improve the combustion efficiency of your boiler, particularly if matched to flue gas oxygen measurement and control.
Alternatively, you may be able to use low pressure steam, or condensate, to preheat feed materials into your process. In this way you can utilise more of the sensible heat within your streams before you get to the point where it becomes waste. This saves energy inputs to your process, whilst reducing the heat load to your cooling towers or effluent discharges. Similarly the use of Organic Rankine Cycles, or similar technologies, could turn your waste heat into electricity that you can use within your process or even sell to the grid network!
You can even use your waste heat to provide chilling for your processes by using an absorption chiller. This device saves you energy in providing refrigeration, by using the same principles as a household refrigerator, only in reverse!
Where can I get help?
Carbon Trust has been set up to help businesses save energy and so reduce the production of carbon dioxide. They also publish specialist guidance that can be useful to help you to begin to save energy. These are available from their website: www.carbontrust.co.uk .
NEPIC can help you to identify other bodies that can provide you with specialist help, tailored to your needs, within the region. Contact us for more information, or to arrange an on-site discussion to begin the process of improving your resource efficiency by emailing Ian Findley on idfindley@aol.com.
 Supported by One NorthEast and Defra's Business Resource Efficiency and Waste Programme
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