Energy-Saving Tip: Compressed Air

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Compressed air is the most expensive utility and is always an opportunity to save energy. In this bonus video of the Better Buildings Challenge SWAP 4 (), brought to you by the U.S. Department of Energy, hear from L’Oréal USA and General Motors about how they approach the challenge of working with compressed air.

SWAP mirrors the goal for DOE's Better Buildings Challenge, an initiative launched in 2011 to improve efficiency of American commercial, institutional, multifamily buildings and industrial plants by 20 percent or more over 10 years with leading CEOs and executives sharing ideas to help spur billions in new investments and energy savings in their facilities.

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Transcript:
In the manufacturing plants, compressed air is always an opportunity.

Something we’re looking at is, is how the, uh, robot dropped the part and shut the compressed air off when it wasn’t in use. If we could implement that across the board in, in some of our facilities, that would really allow us to reduce our compressed air.

One of the biggest challenges is the age of the facility, so it is 32 years old. We have a lot of original equipment, in particular, the compressors are very oversized because we’ve reduced our compressed-air load a lot since the facility first opened, so, we have some opportunities to reduce our compressor size.

I wonder if these are powered up right now and they’re not in operation If you just look at all these robots, there’s so much, uh, compressed-air requirements from all this.

I wonder if they turn off when the shift is over or over the weekend.

Yeah. We can find out.
Compressed air’s a big use of energy in our factories, too, right?

Yep. Sure is.

Definitely. Definitely.

What kinds of things do we do there that might make sense here?

So, one of the things would be, when it’s not in use right here, it’s still powered, so, if they had automatic air dump valves, uh, they could power that down and that would lessen the energy requirement.

When we were talking about your energy-management system; something that I think you guys do particularly well is, you can isolate lights and air in specific areas, whereas, currently, within our factory, if one machine is running, the entire packaging hall is on and it’s lit and it’s, uh, climate controlled. With just a little bit of an investment, we can significantly reduce light, compressed air and HVAC, which are, uh, primary, significant energy users.

I think what I really learned is we can have completely different industries and you, you’ve still got the same basic – you’ve got the facility and the costs and the energy consumption associated with heating and HVAC and it’s really all about tracking, what are your largest consumers of energy, and looking for reduction opportunities there.