Energy Manager

If we're using sustainability as a broader term, there's waste management, water, carbon, renewable power and more. Those are some of the units now part of the equation we're solving for. It sometimes ends up with a different set of solutions than you would typically end up with if you were only looking at dollars.

Robin and Carrie Gillette started Top Hat Mushrooms in a barn on the family farm in Scio, OR, in 1991. Today, they are the largest organic shiitake mushroom grower in the United States, with over 100 employees and three generations of Gillettes committed to continuous improvement.

Johnson Controls’ most recent decarbonization project has gone right to the heart of its 2040 net-zero commitment – working with its own Norman, Oklahoma, manufacturing facility on a chilled water plant and compressed air system upgrade that is projected to nearly halve its greenhouse gas emissions.

In February 2021, Chiller & Cooling Best Practices Magazine interviewed members of the Intertape Polymer Group Inc. (IPG) Sustainability Pillars team to gain an understanding of the work being done to improve energy efficiency. The team members interviewed were Michael Jones (Director of Corporate Energy), Michael Deitering (Senior Project Engineer), Jarrod Knapp (Maintenance Manager) and Mark Secord (Engineering Group Leader).

Do water-cooled chiller plants still deliver lower utility bills? Today, many chiller plant energy analyses carefully account for energy costs, and even energy escalation rates – a factor that projects how fuel costs will increase over time, while ignoring water and wastewater costs associated with cooling towers. While highly effective at transferring heat, cooling towers consume millions of gallons of water each year through the process of evaporation, drift, and blowdown. With the rising cost of water and wastewater, this omission can result in an incomplete picture for the building owner.

Among key initiatives at DENSO’s Maryville, Tennessee, facility is the use of an innovative ice-storage system engineered to provide environmentally friendly comfort cooling to employees at the company’s main production facility. The system also allows Plant 101 to reduce cooling costs per ton by 44%, while providing a payback of less than four years. It also resulted in an annual carbon dioxide (CO2) reduction of 18,000 tons.

Since 2002, Energy Trust of Oregon have saved and generated 728 average megawatts of electricity and 52 million annual therms of natural gas. This is enough energy to power Multnomah and Washington counties while heating Deschutes County homes. ETO has saved enough energy equal to the output of a power plant and reduced reliance on fossil fuels. In total, they have invested $1.5 billion to save customers more than $6.9 billion on their energy bills over time.

The ComEd® Energy Efficiency Program offers incentives to help facilities save money by improving the efficiency of their equipment. Industries can receive standard cash incentives for common energy efficiency improvements or custom cash incentives for making improvements not included in the standard program.

A manufacturing site’s central utility plant (CUP) provides 24/7 cooling for critical R&D laboratories, critical manufacturing processes, data centers and office space. Over a period of several years, campus growth had significantly increased facility energy consumption, raising costs dramatically. Simultaneously, the host state enacted a legislation to deregulate utilities, a move potentially doubling the cost of electricity.

Chrysler’s Technology Center (CTC), located in Auburn Hills, MI, is home to some fourteen thousand employees responsible for keeping the automotive giant in motion. Completed in 1991, the complex is essentially a small city, encompassing 5.3 million square feet situated on over 500 acres. In addition to corporate offices, the facility houses a full laboratory level of various wind tunnels with thermal testing capabilities, a 1.8-mile evaluation road, a noise/vibration facility, an electromagnetic compatibility center, an environmental test center (able to create rain, snow and extreme temperatures), and a pilot production plant.