Potenzial: Energy Efficiency

Today there is a big challenge for producing companies to improve their energy efficiency. Generally, a lot of separate measures are performed to optimize energy efficiency of objects in a factory. Because of a missing holistic consideration of interdependencies between the objects in a factory, a huge potential to save energy is completely ignored. To encounter this obvious weak point, the developed method, which is descripted in this article, enables to valuate and design energy efficient factories considering the interdependencies. The factory is observed on two different levels of detail. The method is focused on small and medium-sized factories.

The lack of information concerning energy flows can be seen as a significant barrier to increase energy efficiency in an industry. The extension of energy measurement systems often fails due to the difficult appraisal of expected reflux. The suggested model presents a way to overcome this barrier by forecasting potentials and including soft facts into the appraisal as well. Learning effects objectify the presented model through time and make it more stable. As a result an expected net present value can be calculated and used to estimate the benefit of installing a measurement device into a given technical system.

In many industries the success of companies depends on efficient and sustainable processes: In which way higher output can be achieved by less resource consumption? Many process optimization projects improve single processes but not the whole process chain. Thus a high amount of potentials of resource efficiency are unutilized in manufacturing. For realising enormous achievements energy and resource efficiency have to be integrated into the optimization process.

The article presents an approach for the integration of the energy efficiency in factory planning processes. The main focus is not on the constructional hull but rather on the energy-efficient designing of production processes and production plants. The approach is of general validity but in the present example it is applied to the automotive industry. Main contents of the approach are aimed at the life cycle consideration of production plants.