New Report Highlights Best Strategies for Energy Assessment

GreenBiz
July 6, 2006

WASHINGTON, June 6, 2006 - The Alliance to Save Energy, in cooperation with 80 industrial energy experts and users, has released a report offering world-class strategies for conducting effective energy assessments within manufacturing facilities.

The report, World-Class Energy Assessments, is a resource for facility managers looking to control manufacturing costs by improving the overall energy efficiency of their operations. It is one of four new industrial reports that can be downloaded from the Alliance Web site.

The stakes are enormous—one large manufacturing facility consumes as much natural gas in one year as 20,000 individual homes. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), as part of its Save Energy Now campaign, is currently conducting free energy assessments of 200 of the largest industrial facilities in the U.S. The average Save Energy Now assessment identifies $3 million in potential savings for implementing energy-efficiency equipment and practices.

Unfortunately, facilities typically implement only 30 to 40 percent of the energy-saving measures recommended to them.

To help rectify that situation, the Alliance earlier this year brought together energy assessment practitioners, industrial managers, and other technical experts in a series of roundtable discussions to identify barriers to industry implementation of energy-efficient equipment and practices. The resulting World-Class Energy Assessments report makes the results of those discussions available to industrial managers.

"Manufacturers dealing with high energy expenses need more than a list of projects," says Christopher Russell, director of industrial programs at the Alliance to Save Energy. "To achieve results following an assessment requires cooperation across departmental boundaries within a facility. A world-class energy assessment examines technical and organizational attributes in tandem. The result is a business plan for managing energy improvements."