I Saved a Company £100,000 a Year: A Case Study

As an industrial energy efficiency assessor, Paula is an expert at seeing where energy savings can be made. “We work with a lot of companies and large industries that have developed ways of doing things over the years, without looking specifically at how they are using energy,” she says. Routinely, Paula can go into even a medium sized company and save tens of thousands of pounds, sometimes even more. Recently, she worked with a small team of three other assessors to look at a British chemical company, who predominantly produce raw materials for the textile and clothing industry.

“Some people assume that we can only make energy savings by switching a company to a different fuel source, or introducing some sort of alternative energy that is from a renewable fuel source such as solar power or wind power, but this is far from the case,” she says. Although a move to more environmentally friendly fuels would be great, most companies can benefit by having experts like Paula take a long hard look at the processes they carry out, the equipment they use and how they might become more efficient.

Energy Efficiency Assessment in Progress

In the recent project, Paula’s team put together a package of recommendations for the company, which included making improvements to the air compressor systems they were using, to put together all the cooling facilities that were used for dye storage and to put in a heat recovery boiler into the thermal oxidiser used within the factory. “This was a typical job really – different parts of the operation were contained within a building from the early 1900s that was not purpose-built and the rest was in single storey concrete blocks put up in the 1960s – which were even worse suited to the present-day function of the company,” explains Paula.

Different parts of the manufacturing process had been split up as the company had grown, rather the whole set up planned from the start. “By making some relatively inexpensive changes, we managed to amalgamate three cooling rooms into one, so that was a third of the power requirement straight away,” she says.

Cutting Down Bills of a Million Pounds

When Paula’s team began their assessment, the company was spending an unbelievable £1 million per year on heating and electricity to power its operations. “As well as combining the cooling systems, we also suggested a heat recovery boiler to mop up the otherwise wasted heat produced by the thermal oxidiser and also that the boiler system should be upgraded,” says Paula. In the first year, the assessment costs, the money needed to make the changes was around £200,000, but the savings on the fuel bills was £300,000. That produced an overall saving of £100,000.

“Of course, that was only in the first year – in the second and subsequent years, that saving should continue, so the company should be saving around £300,000 per year, each and every year. Some increases can be expected with fuel bills because of the generally increasing prices, and we did recommend more servicing and maintenance, but the company should be saving at least a quarter of a million pounds in running costs from now on, which makes us all very pleased that our job was worthwhile,” grins Paula.

More Savings at Larger Plants

Paula specialises in small to medium sized companies but her own firm of assessment consultants regularly works with extremely large corporations in the USA, Russia and Europe. “At a recent conference, one presentation was about an assessment in the States that saved a company over $2 million dollars in the first year – that’s an amazing saving and it just goes to show how much of the Earth’s resources we are wasting every day – the sooner we make savings by being more efficient, the better,” she concludes.