Watson: The Energy Star Website says, “You know what’s motivating? Finding out you’re behind the curve and you didn’t even know it." Is that what really motivates people Holmes, to find out that their building has a low Energy Star Rating? Holmes: That’s a new one on me.
Watson: The Benchmarking and Energy Star Rating program is based on comparing one building’s energy usage with that of a similar one, whether it be a home, church, school, hospital or industrial plant, to see how you stack up, how you are doing.
I was curious about how this comparison method could be applied to an Industrial Plant so I looked at the Industrial Energy Management Information Center page on the Energy Star Website. It offers energy efficiency information on many types of industries including Aluminum, Cement, Chemical, Food Processing, Vehicle Manufacturing and more. The Plant Energy Auditing page says that, “conducting plant energy audits is vital to a strong energy management program”. Do you agree Holmes?
Holmes: We have done projects in plants owned by Alcoa Aluminum, Kosmos Cement, Mariah Meat Packing, G.E. (appliance manufacturing), RCA (plastic injection molding), Honda & GenCorp (automotive), Golden Castings (foundry), Rexnord (heat treating) and more. In those projects, the first step was to install a Permanent Energy Monitoring System on the main utility meters as well as on energy systems throughout the plants. We didn’t benchmark or do energy audits in any of these plants.