ACEEE Symposium: Energy Efficiency and the Future of Manufacturing in the U.S. & Canada

The American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE) hosted a symposium entitled “Energy Efficiency and the Future of Manufacturing in the U.S. & Canada,”  as part of an ongoing series of events to commemorate ACEEE’s 30th anniversary. 

The symposium was well attended and featured speakers from ACEEE, Steel Founders Society of America, American Iron and Steel Institute, Center for American Progress, Pew Center on Global Climate Change, Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters, National Association of Manufacturers, Rockwell Automation, and the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA).  The speakers discussed policy perspectives, industrial energy management, supply chains, smart manufacturing and future trends in modern manufacturing.  Industrial supply chains and smart manufacturing garnered particular interest from the audience due to the potential for energy efficiency gains.

Industrial Supply Chains

Up to 85 percent of the energy used in manufacturing is embedded in upstream production (i.e., the supply or value chain), according to Neal Elliot, ACEEE associate director for research.  Companies within industrial supply chains offer numerous opportunities to reduce redundancy, energy use, emissions and product waste.  Structural relationships within industrial supply chains, such as utility and trade associations, also can be leveraged to promote energy efficiency.

Challenges in implementing energy efficiency through supply chains include working across corporate lines, which cause data confidentiality issues; measurement and verification of energy savings, which can vary widely; and regulatory ambiguity.  In order for suppliers and customers to improve energy efficiency, the U.S. and Canadian governments must develop policies that provide appropriate market signals. Such policies should stress incremental improvements and provide incentives for high performances in lieu of absolute requirements, Elliot said. Because the industrial sectors in the United States and Canada are highly intertwined, comprehensive coverage calls for an approach that applies across the border.

Smart Manufacturing

Smart manufacturing can enable greater energy efficiency for industrial plants without large-scale capital spending, according to Philip Kaufman, a business manager for Rockwell Automation. Many plants already have automation assets, and such controls can increase efficiency through simple software upgrades. Kaufman suggested fostering a corporate culture that prizes continuous monitoring and improvement and tying energy to production inputs. In so doing, a plant includes energy among its list of production inputs, making energy use more apparent to industrial process engineers. To optimize energy use in manufacturing, plant managers must leverage data into actionable results and view energy as a valuable raw material — as opposed to an operational cost, Kaufman said.

A challenge in linking smart manufacturing and energy efficiency is the requirement for network infrastructure. Mobilizing such infrastructure hinges on a universal high performance computing and communications standard to enable communication in real time between plants and utilities.  This system comes with the additional challenge of determining how to share proprietary platforms and data. 

One solution could come from the Smart Process Manufacturing Research Collaborative, according to Jim Davis, a principle investigator at UCLA.  This collaborative is a result of a National Science Foundation grant to develop a 25-year smart manufacturing strategy.  To be successful, industrial stakeholders will need to tackle energy issues in conjunction with other sustainability aspects and supply chains.  Challenges include monitoring system-wide operations and properly applying data to operating models.   

A policy summit sponsored by the Alliance to Save Energy titled From Power Plant to Plug & Beyond, to be held on Sept. 14 and 15, 2010, in Washington D.C., will involve several industries, academia, government and manufacturing consortia, and should yield significant progress on the issue.