The European energy crisis demands adjustments. The crisis has prompted the French government to impose a mandatory energy savings target of 10% for businesses. For us, as Denkavit, this is an exciting challenge that we are happy to take on together with our French colleagues. Also at our location in Voorthuizen, Netherlands, several initiatives have been and are being developed to achieve 10% energy savings. Achieving this goal will not only contribute to our sustainability strategy but also provide a significant financial benefit due to the sharply increased energy costs. In this article, we would like to tell you more about our, already implemented and yet-to-be-realized, initiatives to achieve energy savings.
We have a lot of measuring equipment that makes our electricity and gas usage transparent. The first challenge was to balance the energy supply and usage. This was important to validate the actual amount of consumed electricity or gas. It made it possible to perform different analyses that led us to the factory areas where consumption was estimated to be “high”. Furthermore, we can now assign the consumption of certain machines with “high consumption” in the factory to a specific production order. This allows us to evaluate the success of initiatives.
We have identified or already taken several initiatives to achieve 10% energy savings. We would like to tell you more about them:
1. Measurement instruments are being installed to specifically detect compressed air leaks in the factory so that we can reduce our electricity consumption. Compressed air significantly contributes to electricity consumption.
2. All our factory and office spaces will be equipped with LED lighting instead of fluorescent fixtures (which account for 10% of our current electricity consumption). This will achieve the same light output with half the power! A smarter light switch control will further reduce electricity consumption.
3. We will implement a smarter control system for heating our fat tanks. This is an interesting project that will contribute to reducing our gas consumption.
These are just a few examples of what awaits us! Let us know what you think of our initiatives. Perhaps you have ideas for saving energy, which we would be happy to hear!
Curious about what else we are doing to reduce our footprint? Read more here!