In a manufacturing facility the building is rarely the problem. Process loads, compressed air, motors and thermal systems usually dominate consumption — and they are exactly what a building-focused audit misses.
Audit a factory the way you would audit an office and you will produce a report about lighting and roof insulation while ignoring eighty percent of the bill. Industrial facilities are dominated by what happens on the production floor, and assessing that requires a different survey.
Compressed air is among the most expensive energy carriers in a plant, because you pay for electricity and receive a fraction of it as usable work. Leak load alone commonly runs twenty to thirty percent of production.
It is also the easiest system to improve, because most of the opportunity is leak repair, pressure reduction and control strategy rather than capital replacement. It is usually the first thing we look at and frequently the fastest payback in the report.
Industrial loads vary with production, which makes nameplate data almost useless. A motor rated at 75 kW running at 40% load is a different proposition from the same motor at 90%, and you cannot tell which by looking at it.
Level 2 and Level 3 industrial audits therefore include logging on major loads — power, pressure, flow and temperature as appropriate — over a period that captures representative production. Where production varies seasonally or by shift pattern, we say so and scope the logging accordingly rather than extrapolating from a quiet week.
Energy measures in a plant are constrained by production in ways they are not in an office. Reducing compressed air pressure affects tooling. Changing an oven's control strategy affects throughput and product quality. Heat recovery adds equipment into a space that may not have room for it.
Every measure in our report states its production interaction explicitly, and measures that would affect output are flagged for your operations team to assess before they go into a capital plan. A recommendation that ignores production is a recommendation that gets rejected in the first meeting.
Industrial measures typically route through custom incentive streams rather than prescriptive ones, because the equipment and savings are facility-specific. Save on Energy's Retrofit Program funds up to 50% of eligible project cost across Prescriptive and Custom streams, with doubled rates for most non-lighting measures in electricity-constrained regions. Enbridge funds commercial and industrial custom projects on the gas side, with assessment pre-approval required before work begins.
Custom industrial incentives are calculated from measured baselines. If equipment is replaced before the baseline is established, the savings cannot be demonstrated and the incentive is usually lost. Involve us before anything is ordered.
Related
Request a proposal
A compliance deadline, an incentive application, a financing requirement, or a capital plan. Tell us which, and we will tell you what you need and what it will cost — as a fixed fee, before any work starts.
If you do not need an audit, we will say so.