Yet another perk of energy-efficient buildings

Car plant cuts energy costs $627,000 with two-month payback -- with DOE help

Posted by Joseph Romm (Guest Contributor) at 10:00 AM on 09 Mar 2008

Economic models greatly overestimate the cost of carbon mitigation, in large part because economists simply don't believe (and hence don't model) that the economy has lots of high-return energy efficiency opportunities. In their theory, the economy is always operating near efficiency. Reality is very different than economic models.

I have never visited a factory or commercial buildings that didn't have huge energy-saving opportunities, many of which also increase productivity. I wrote a book several years ago with a hundred real-world case studies: Cool Companies: How the Best Businesses Boost Profits and Productivity by Cutting Greenhouse Gas Emissions. Studies that model such real-world savings, like the 2007 McKinsey & Co. report, find deep emissions reductions are possible at low net cost to the U.S. (and world) economy.

Government has an important role in enabling these energy savings. The office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy, which I used to run, has lots of (underfunded) programs that deliver savings every day. One typical example showed up in my inbox yesterday, from the Industrial Technologies Program:

Optimizing boiler operation, reducing boiler blowdown, and implementing an ongoing steam trap maintenance program are just some of the steps Chrysler's St. Louis complex took to save approximately $627,000 per year in energy costs. The complex, which produces mainly cars and light-duty trucks, received a DOE Save Energy Now energy assessment from Energy Expert Riyaz Papar of Hudson Technologies. Papar worked with two Chrysler employees to analyze the complex's steam system utilizing DOE's Steam System Assessment Tool (SSAT) software. By implementing several of the assessment recommendations, the complex achieved a simple payback of just over two months and is saving more than 70,000 MMBtu in natural gas annually. To learn more and see which Save Energy Now energy savings recommendations can be applied to your plant, read the case study (PDF 578 KB).

Why don't companies take advantage of such amazing efficiency opportunities on their own?

That is a long story I discuss at length in my book and will address in a later post. I do recommend reading the case study (PDF) if you are interested in understanding the kind of savings companies can achieve and the key roll government can play.

Steam accounts for $24 billion a year of U.S manufacturing energy costs, and 40 percent of U.S. industrial carbon-dioxide emissions. Yet even large, sophisticated companies with major energy management efforts are missing the huge energy-saving opportunities. Until Bush came along, the DOE had a very robust effort to work with the energy-intensive industries to help them (1) adopt technologies that save energy, cut pollution, and increase productivity, and (2) develop new technologies. Sadly, Bush has gutted many of those programs.

Any president who is actually serious about global warming (and technological solutions), however, would want to dramatically increase funding for these efforts.

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

For story: Yet another perk of energy-efficient buildings
5 Comments | Post a Comment

tell Congress

seriously

who is your lobbyist?

by ce1907 at 12:11 PM on 09 Mar 2008

It really is amazing.

It really is amazing that many industrial processes have not been optimized. I would expect that a lot of them were optimized under the assumption of low (but non zero) energy costs, and would need to be rerun for modern (and expected) near future costs.

I suspect that some of the biggest low hanging fruit is in the commercial retailing sector, where open refrigerated goods are so common, and where I would think the local managers are likely clueless about physics/thermodynamics.

by bigTom at 12:56 PM on 09 Mar 2008

Well, Duh!!

I'm quite sure that if I really wanted to I could sit around all day spotting energy saving opportunities using nothing more than Google's "Earth" programs.

Every single gas-pack HVAC system mounted on a roof in the US could be replaced by a geo-exchange HVAC system at a energy profit and dollar profit. Even the units that just got replaced yesterday with brand new units. Get on "Earth" and scan your city and you will find thousands of these. They are the large blocky items on flat roofs.

If Google would be so kind as to provide us with infrared scans of those same cities it would be even easier to find the savings. Just look for the bright red spots. You have to take the scans an hour after sunset to limit background noise from sunlight but that's simple.

Likewise every roof in the US should be white to limit radiative losses in the winter and heat loading in the summer. Of course black asphalt shingle is still the most popular roofing material. Just the fact that it's not prohibitively expensive to buy this stuff is proof positive that we aren't serious about global warming. Every roof in the US is going to need replacement in the next 50 years with the exception of rare copper and slate roofs. All of them.

Ditto single-pane window glass, rebuilt engines, diesel water pumps (diesel anything actually), high-volume shower heads, top loading washing machines, low-volume clothes dryers (crowded clothes dry slower, who knew?) incandescent light bulbs and non-electronic lighting ballasts.

Engineers with the right attitude could cut process costs from probably every production system they look at. Waste is endemic in the system as the whole thing has been designed to cut labor costs at the expense of everything else.

Put the Carbon Back

by Pangolin at 6:34 PM on 09 Mar 2008

Well Ok, I see you point.

Of course roofs in warm climates (where A/C dominates over heating) should be highly reflective. Thermal emissivity and shortwave (solar heat) are usually not very correlated. I( once had a stainless steel roof (in New Mexico), that was doubly bad for summer time, as not only would it absorb a considerable amount of solar radiation, but the infrared emissivity was also very low. Once I painted it white I had no more problems with overheating (at over 7000 feet one shouldn't need AC). I calculated that I got more cooling from the fact that white paint has much higher emissivity than metal, than I did from the increased reflectance. About half of solar radiation is near infrared (1.8 to .8 microns) roughly. California mandated roofing tiles be reflective in the near infrared. That solves about half the problem while not challenging the taste for dark colored roofs. I thought I heard they were considering mandating white roofs in the future. That would probably half summertime peak loads if it were implemented.

I believe the Chinese were experimenting with color changing paint, which would be dark during cold weather, but highly reflective during warm weather. I don't know how the experiment worked out.

by bigTom at 7:23 PM on 09 Mar 2008
[ Parent ]

why the efficiency opportunity gets lost

The point about why profit seeking companies have not been generally alert so far to the "low hanging fruit" w/ energy efficiency is an interesting one.

Sure, economists are dogmatic in insisting that there are "no free lunches," that the marketplace simply could not have left so many cost-cutting stones unturned. they ignore abundant evidence that the real commercial world is not the perfect market of their imagination.

But maybe the "process engineer" perspective is just as myopic. Example: if you could dig the lost pocket change out from under the cushions in every couch in America, you would be fabulously wealthy! But obviously the reason that doesn't work is how much time it would take.

It doesn't make sense to spend a dollar's worth of attention to save a dime of energy cost. This, i believe, is why the market has manifestly failed in this instance. While energy savings could be cumulatively large, labor looms far larger on most companies' bottom lines so that's the first place they look for cost reductions. moreover, there's some evidence that energy savings in one sphere gets translated into more consumption in another as long as the price of energy stays the same or lower.

While government can address some of the information deficits and resolve selected market imperfections, I think we ultimately have to bite the bullet of sustained price increases in order to call forth a sustained attention to conservation and improved efficiency from managers and consumers.

To not be just punitive w/ higher prices, I think the political demand needs to be to curtail pollution, period.

If that mandate can get accomplished cost-free, great. If a marginally higher price spurs cost-effective efficiency that eventually reduces net energy costs down to a pre-mandate level, very good.

If instead, it forces an actual reduction in demand for consumer goods, this is not so great but what are our values & priorities? Survival must trump comfort and economic growth.

by Green Texan at 1:11 AM on 11 Mar 2008

ADVERTISING POLICY

You are not logged in. Thus, you cannot post a comment. If you have an account, log in. If you don't have an account, well, by all means go make one! Meet you back here in five.