Lean Programs and Energy Efficiency

As mentioned in our previous blog, energy efficiency measures improve your bottom line.

Incorporating energy efficiency into your lean program makes a lot of sense. Here’s why adding energy efficiency to your lean department’s responsibilities will maximize your energy savings:

  • Alignment with your corporate goals. Your lean department’s key performance indicators already include reducing waste in its various forms. Adding energy efficiency in their key performance indicators shows how energy efficiency aligns to corporate goals, signals to your employees the importance of energy cost reduction, and most importantly, identifies your internal champion for energy efficiency in your organization, making it more likely that you’ll redeem energy savings year after year.
  • Identification of energy-saving opportunities. Your lean program’s existing tools and competencies are also effective at systematically identifying energy saving opportunities. For example, let’s apply their “eight kinds of waste” tool to your overall energy consumption. Let’s assume you’re a chemical manufacturer whose energy use closely follows Figure 1 below.

Figure 1 Productive and wasted energy by end-use at your chemical facility (example)[1]

Despite consuming 56% of your energy, process heating & cooling loses or wastes only 23% of its inputs. On the other hand, motor-driven systems waste 72% of the energy they consume — wasting even more energy than process heating and cooling. That makes motor efficiency improvements your largest energy efficiency opportunity.

FIGURE 2 The eight kinds of energy waste applied to a chemical manufacturing facility (example)

Since managing your motors is key to achieving your energy management goals, let’s focus your energy efficiency audit on your motor-driven systems. Motor energy waste usually falls under one of two categories – shaft or system losses. While equipment inefficiencies and wear and tear fall under shaft losses, system losses could relate to poor design processes.

Now let’s classify the “eight kinds of waste”[2]  to your motor waste. For example, as shown in Figure 2 shaft losses could be as a result of either over-production or re-work while system losses could be due to motion, transportation or over-specification.

For more information on incorporating energy efficiency into your organization’s lean program, download our Industrial Energy Efficiency whitepaper.

[1] Oak Ridge National Laboratory & Energetics, Inc., “US Manufacturing Energy Use and Greenhouse Gas Emissions Analysis,” Report # ORNL/TM-2012/504 (2012).

[2] McKinsey Sustainability & Resource Productivity. Energy Efficiency: A compelling Global Resource. Page 34

[3] McKinsey Sustainability & Resource Productivity. Energy Efficiency: A compelling Global Resource. Page 34

 

 

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