Becoming more sustainable with renewable energies without sacrificing production
For an industrial production site in Saxony, goodmen energy was commissioned to develop an efficient and sustainable energy concept for the existing production and for a planned new building. The customer wants to turn their company into a more sustainable one and save energy. However, there is currently an extremely high electricity consumption to enable production at the site. This is now to be improved in a balancing way. The electricity consumption in the inventory is currently almost 25 GWh per year. This is roughly equivalent to 6,000 times the consumption of a family of four. Most of the electricity is consumed in the production process of the plastic products manufactured there. Other large consumers are cooling, pumps and compressed air. The construction of a planned new production hall will further increase the energy demand.
In our feasibility study, we were able to show high savings potentials:
Installing and using more PV systems alone would save costs of €290,000/year. The use of hybrid coolers would mean another €143,000 less per year. The potential would be greatest if wind turbines were realised: with an installed capacity of 10 MW, electricity costs would be reduced by over €1 million (prices as of 10/2022).
Details
We carried out a detailed needs analysis for the customer. This served as the basis for further action. After a precise analysis of the consumption, the potential savings in electricity consumption were determined and corresponding measures were developed: First of all, insulation measures for the tools and the use of cooling towers to provide the process water should be mentioned here. These energy-saving measures can be easily implemented, especially in new buildings. The remaining electricity consumption could be covered by (further) PV systems on the roofs and wind turbines in the immediate vicinity from renewable sources. The implementation of these measures means immense savings in the longer term, both financially and in terms of environmental impact. The approvability of the wind turbines is currently still being investigated.