The Changing Winds of Sustainable Manufacturing
Wind can play crucial role in driving energy efficiency and pricing stability while saving money in companies’ sustainability plans.
Having some kind of environmental sustainability plan is rapidly transforming from a choice to an imperative. With dramatic pressure being heaped on manufacturers by customers, public opinion, business partners and regulators, it’s really not will you go green, but when and how.
According to Dr. Stephen Stokes, vice president of business and climate change for AMR Research, sustainability is rapidly becoming a critical element in any manufacturer’s business plan “especially when it is considered as a means for driving energy and emission efficiency.”
In his 2008 report, Crossing the Great Divide: Sustainability as Corporate Strategy, Stokes writes, “There has been a deafening wake-up call over the past year … on the importance of constructing robust and diverse energy and resource acquisition/utilization programs … The green economy is a lean economy, so it is necessary to redefine the key wastes of lean production and seek out innovative and alternative approaches to energy and commodity procurement and use.”
The good news is that embracing sustainable manufacturing will save you money. Bob Bechtold, president and founder of Ontario, NY-based Harbec Plastics, calls it eco-economics. “Energy costs money,” says Bechtold. “So who cares about the environment? Just save money.”
In 2008, Bechtold came to the happy realization that his energy costs had dropped by 35 percent despite steadily growing the business for three years running. Bechtold says this is a direct result of the company installing its own alternative renewable and onsite Combined Heat and Power (CHP) sources to compliment the municipal grid.
The motivation for doing this wasn’t about being green, says Bechtold. When the custom injection molding company was reliant exclusively on the grid, “brown outs” were becoming a serious problem.
Harbec supplies short run or unique parts to the medical, automotive and consumer goods industries, often with very short lead times. Any power disruption would scrap the sophisticated sequences being performed by CNC machines and CAD stations, which then needed six to eight hours to reprogram and restart. Another hour of production time was required to reset the other machines in the process. The costs kept piling up as you replaced the raw materials wasted due to damaged or lost batches. Everything in the place is computerized, adds Bechtold, so a brown out would cost us the batch plus we’d have to replace burned out circuit boards causing even more machine downtime.
Harbec experienced three such outages in June 1999 alone.
In response the power company offered to put a step-up transformer a little closer to the company, but Harbec would have to pay $100,000 and there was no guarantee it would solve the problem. Instead, he installed an ultra efficient Combined Heat and Power (CHP, also referred to as cogeneration) plant supplemented by a 250 kW wind turbine which meets up to 15 percent of the plant’s power needs.
And Harbec isn’t the only company going with wind.
San Antonio, Tex.-based oil refiner Valero Energy Corp., recently installed 33 windmills to supply a refinery in Sunray, Tex. with green electricity to produce gasoline and diesel.
Just like Harbec Plastics, Valero wants to add predictability and stability to fluctuating electricity prices by becoming more self reliant. Currently, the refinery’s electricity bill runs to $1.4-million-a-month so the $115 million wind farm will pay for itself in about 10 years at current electricity prices.
“Every plant needs a reliable source of energy, and wind can certainly be a part of that” says David Jones, Segment Manager for the Wind Energy Market for Siemens Industry, Inc. Siemens, through its various divisions, has long been one of Europe’s leading suppliers of wind turbines, the components that go into them and all the control systems required to make them run and Jones says that the company is rapidly gaining traction in North America as the market here grows.
“I’ve been getting a lot of inquiries from companies that are looking into the viability of wind power. Some people are looking for small deployments of one or two windmills while others are looking to participate in or establish large wind farms.
Over the past few years the United States has added more wind energy to its grid than any other country. According to the American Wind Power Association, wind power generation in the U.S. was up 31.8% in February, 2007 from February, 2006. Texas, in particular, has embraced wind power and took over the lead in installed capacity from California in 2006.
Wind power isn’t universally loved, however. Detractors point out the fact that – critically for businesses like Harbec that can’t afford brown-outs – the wind doesn’t always blow, even in high wind sites.
“I’ve heard people say that you can’t rely completely on wind and that you have to have a 100 percent capacity back up to step in should something go wrong and it’s true, but only up to a point,” says Jones. “Everything needs a dance partner, no matter what your power source is. If you can’t afford to go down, then you have to be able to switch over to something else quickly. That’s the same for anything: wind, solar, natural gas, the municipal grid, whatever. So I think they are being a bit disingenuous with that.
Another knock is the claim that wind isn’t cheaper than non-renewable forms of energy. This also has a grain of truth. Certainly the up-front cost of installing the turbine wasn’t inconsiderable for Harbec. However, Bechtold says the total project will pay for itself in 10 years and he now has a lock on his energy costs for the next 25 years – a period of time that many experts, including Stokes, say will be tumultuous for energy prices.
“There are implementation costs with anything,” says Jones, adding that once implementation is complete, wind is free. “These turbines have a pretty long lifecycle. All you have to do is maintain them and they will pay for themselves.”
According to Bechtold, they can also become a source of revenue generation by selling excess capacity back to the grid, though he hastens to add that Harbec uses all the power it makes (to offset utility power) which is much more valuable.
“Humanity has been using wind power to propel economic prosperity for more than 5000 years,” concludes Jones. “Great Britain used it to build an empire that spanned the globe. Today it’s back as part of the solution to a serious problem facing businesses and society as a whole.”
Additional resources:
The World Wind Energy Association: http://www.wwindea.org
The American Wind Energy Association: http://www.awea.org/
Siemens Industry page on renewable energy: http://www.usa.siemens.com/renewableenergy
Wikipedia primer on wind power: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power
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