Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
There are ways to save energy and water in production, but they are
subordinate to production demands and regulatory requirements.
While office buildings have to comply with building codes, how
complex are those compared to FSMA requirements, other safety
regulations and customer demands for production practices that meet
certain standards?
“You can’t not get the food up to the kill temperature just to save
energy,” says Warren Green, vice president and manager of process
engineering for Hixson.
“It has to start cold, it has to get warmed up, then, if it’s traditional
white milk, you’ve got to bring it back down and refrigerate it again,”
he says.
All of that takes energy and water, and those demands grow
exponentially when you start adding in all the pieces of the production
process. That makes energy and water management and efficiency a
daunting task, but not an impossible one. Processors have options, and
understanding how those options can be taken advantage of is critical
to achieving savings in energy, water and the money required by both
of those things.
You more than likely apply this concept to all aspects of your
production, even if you don’t put it in those terms. You measure how
many of a particular product come off of a production line damaged
during a run to make sure you’re within an acceptable failure rate. You
measure how much capacity you have during peak times and how much
wiggle room you have to expand production if necessary. You measure
the number of employees you have on a production line, how many
hours they work and how few you can get by with if circumstances
demand it.
You measure all those things, so that you can manage them, and your
utilities should be no different. It starts with looking at your utility bills
and asking two questions:
This applies to energy as well. In both cases, it’s easy to find out the
top-line number of how much electricity, water and natural gas you’re
using. But how much electricity are your conveyor belts using? How
much water are you using for washdowns? How much natural gas are
your ovens and dryers using?
When you can answer those questions, then you have information that
you can really use to start finding efficiencies. Older equipment was a
“black box,” says Phil Kaufman, energy technology manager for
Rockwell Automation. You generally couldn’t pull any information
from it on how much energy it was using, so you couldn’t break down
energy usage by each step of the production process.
There are a lot of ways to take advantage of that information, and they
range from upgrading or maximizing the capabilities of equipment to
offering improved training and focus on the operator’s role. But they
all start from the point of measurement, says Brett Robison, strategic
business leader in food and beverage industry for U.S. Water.
“Things like phosphorus, for example, are getting more and more
tightly regulated,” says Robison. “Just because we were able to keep it
at 2 ppm for a decade coming out of the plant, maybe it’s going to
[hypothetically] be .5 ppm next year.”
So, the first step is ensuring that you’re hitting your required targets as
efficiently as possible. The next is taking a look at your processes from
both a big-picture and a detailed perspective to see if there’s anything
you can do to improve their overall efficiency, and not just saying,
“We’re meeting regulations, so we’re good.”
Your utility and your machines will both offer you data to help evaluate
your peak usage. The machines can tell you how much you’re using in
each part of the process; the utility can tell you how much your usage
during those times is costing you. Getting hit with a big demand charge
for a spike in usage during peak hours can cost literally thousands of
dollars.
“Just cognizance and knowledge that those charges are out there is
kind of like step 1, and step 2 is ‘Is there really something that we can
do substantively in our day-to-day operations?’” says Hixson’s Green.
“Some just don’t have that luxury, and others might have a little bit
more float in their schedule where they can shift things.
Another possibility is taking advantage of the off hours for things, such
as ice building, even if you can’t shift production. By making ice at
night, during times of lower demand, you can use it during the day to
help cool without having to make it on the fly.
Investing in efficiency
New equipment can offer huge advantages in terms of not only the
information it can provide, but in its operating efficiency. But that
leads to a bit of a conundrum for food processors: If you’re buying a
piece of equipment that has an expected lifespan of 15 or 20 years, will
it still be efficient as it approaches the end of its service time?
When making the case for upgrades, large or small, processors can take
some steps to increase their chances of approval. The one that comes
to mind for most people is being able to show a relatively short
payback, because as more people become familiar with efficiency and
sustainability initiatives, they become more open to the idea of “pay
more now, but save much more over time.” When the people making
the financial decisions are open to that idea, then having a projection
backed by data makes it an easier sell to spend more money up front.
“People are still trying to make good business decisions, but they’re
trying to get a little more data-driven in their decision-making,” says
U.S. Water’s Robison. “You might walk into an old, old plant, but
they’ve got five new pieces of equipment that they just invested
millions and millions of dollars in. Well, sometimes, you’ve got to work
with what you’ve got; sometimes, you may have to put a plan together
to say, ‘This is somewhere where we might want to look at investing
capital at some point in time, because here’s the payback.’”
Operational efficiency
Equipment, data collection, measurement and strategy are all
important, but any or all of them can be ruined by inefficient
operations. To go back to the office building example, giving employees
access to the thermostats may cut down on complaints, but it probably
won’t do your heating bill any favors.
A similar concept applies to plant operations. Automation and controls
can help by managing elements of the process efficiently, but operators
need flexibility to do their jobs. To keep that from ruining your best-
laid plans, you need to evaluate how operators do their jobs not only
from a production-efficiency standpoint, but from a resource-
efficiency standpoint as well, says Kaufman.
“We want everybody to be like Joe [as an operator], but when we look at
the energy, we want everybody to be like Nancy.”
Training is key to making sure your operators are imitating the best
parts of both Joe and Nancy. Operating-efficiency training helps make
sure that they aren’t wasting time or resources by adding or duplicating
steps, and energy-efficiency training helps make sure they understand
when to shut down equipment or take other steps to ensure resources
aren’t being wasted.
Processors that put in the time and effort to operate efficiently will see
real results in terms of meeting goals and regulatory requirements.
Hixson, www.hixson-inc.com
U.S. Water, www.uswaterservices.com
Rockwell Automation, www.rockwellautomation.com