One of the key highlights during a high level meeting with all senior leaders was the need to develop a systematic Energy Management Program. The objective is to conserve energy not only to save the world but to reduced energy cost which form a major portion of the utilities expenses in all manufacturing operations. As a result, the leaders have decided to form an Energy Management committee and has appointed this expert to be the chairman of the committee.

I play the role of the facilitator to kick start this program as it involved several different industries for which I have worked with. One of my role is to help the chairman to get to know the senior leaders to get their support, and to share my energy management knowledge. For this purpose, I append below a summary of my background and Energy Management Experience:-

1. I hold a C&G Full Cert in Electrical Engineering
2. I am a Certified High Tension Electrical Chargeman with Medium Pressure Power Station in Mining and Palm Oil Mill industries. I have dealt with high powered equipment such as a 630 hp 6.6 kv water pumps used in mining and Steam Turbine and Diesel Generators in Palm Oil Mill.
3. I have worked 10 years as Facilities Engineers in Semi Conductor / Computer Industries dealt with High powered equipment listed below: -

A picture of a Chiller for air conditioner.  This is a piece of high powered equipment that generate chilled water for the air-conditioning in the semiconductor facilities. Due to its stringent temperature and humidity requirements, the control system has to be précised. It is done by automated modulating devices within the chillers. Having said that, I have discovered there are room to optimized the chillers operation with further with proper sequencing and synchronizing of the chillers.

A. Optimization of Air-conditioners Energy Consumption include clean room

As mentioned earlier, précised temperature and humidity are key requirements in the production floor of semiconductor industries. Due to this stringent requirements, high powered chillers are installed. The lower the parameter of these two requirements, the colder is the chilled water which is generated by the chillers, more energy is required for the chillers to lowest the chilled water temperature. One of the key consideration in conserve energy used by the chillers is optimise the temperature and humidity control by reducing heat lost, air volume and temperature zoning for different temperature and humidity requirements within the production floor.

B. Heat Recovery System ( e.g. for hotel hot water system)

The Chiller generate alot of heat. It has its own cooling system called condenser. For big unit, it use water cooled system called cooling tower which come with various sizes (capacities). As the condenser water is warm, a cooling tower is used to cool down the temperature of the water before it is circulated back to the chillier for its cooling function. During this process, heat from the condenser water is discharged into the open air.

In a hotel, hot water or hot air is need to their building. Convention heating equipment such as electrics are installed to generate heat for that purpose. One of my project back in the 80′s was to look into ways to recover the heat from the condenser and recycle back to the building (hotel). A massive but not so complicated heat recovery system was adopted to satisfied this objective. Similar concept was also used to recover heat from the air compressors system, big furnaces such as kiln for ceramic tiles industry.

C. Designed Hot Water Boiler Distribution ( replaced conventional heaters )

One of the common operation in a semiconductor operation is the plating process. The operation  used many conventional heaters for their plating tanks. Electric Heaters are used because of because of it localised temperature control design. The design provides précised temperature control. However, periodically, the solution or water required top up as well as completely changed. Heat is used to its maximum to reheat the solution to the required operating temperature after the change. Not only it is time consuming, but also used up alot of electric energy.

One of my project was to replaced a cool water top up to a hot water top up with a centralised hot water pipe distribution. The hot water was generated by a hot water boiler installed nearby the plating shop.

D. Synchronized 1000 cfm screw compressors with lead/lag control

I dealt with big capacity screwed air compressors that generated compressed dry air to use for the production equipments in the semiconductor / computer factories. Incidentally, compressed dry air is one of the largest utilities consumption in these industries due to its clean manufacturing environment. As a result, this is also carry heavy utilities cost. The best way to conserve compressed air is to reduced wastage due to leaks, over pressured, high pressure drop along distribution pipes etc.

Assuming all these hardware design has been taken care during the planning stage, the fluctuation in the compressed air usage is something to control, unfortunately fluctuation in usage is purely to the needs in the production floor. Hence, the next idea to conserve energy in air compressors is to synchronize them based demand of the compressed.

One of the strategy is to installed a lead/lag mechanism to automatic turn off / on the air compressor periodically. All teh air compressors has a laod / unload mechanism to start / stop compression of air using air presure switch. But this is design more for the purpose of safety to prevent over pressured rather than energy saving. ( During my tenure as a facilities engineer, the air compressor maker did not have this lead / lag system )

During one of the executive development program reviews, there was a team who worked on similar energy conservation project. The team utilised modern equipment such as electrical inverter to regular the power supply as the load of the electrical motor varies. Another equitpment evaluated is able to reduced the “unload” power consumption of big motors.  This equipment reminded me during my mining times where most of the big horse power motors for irregular load condition used D.C. Motors whcih make use of a “rheostat” to regular the speed of the motor.

I am sure my energy management knowledge can provide an overview to the approach to execute this strategy program