U.S.CEEM Members Recognized at the 15th Texas Industrial Energy Management Forum

On April 7, 2011, four companies with manufacturing plants in Texas were honored as having the first plants in the country to achieve Superior Energy Performance (SEP) certification at the 15th Texas Industrial Energy Management Forum, including two member companies of the U.S. Council for Energy Efficient Manufacturing (U.S. CEEM). These certifications marked the successful conclusion of a 3-year pilot phase of SEP, which underscored the collaboration between U.S. CEEM, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the pilot plants to develop and refine the program, which will officially launch nationally in the fall of 2011. This effort also included insights of U.S. manufacturers, standards-making bodies, federal agencies, national laboratories, universities, and other technical experts.

Developed in collaboration with U.S. CEEM, SEP is a plant-level certification program that provides industrial and commercfial facilities with a roadmap for achieving continual improvement in energy efficiency while maintaining competitiveness. By relying on an energy management standard (SEP will use the forthcoming ISO 50001 Energy Management Standard) and industry-identified best practices, SEP intends to elevate energy management to the same level of importance for many industrial plants as product quality, plant safety, waste reduction and inventory management. As a result, SEP was developed to tie in with existing corporate management systems, such as ISO 9001:2000, 14001:2004, and Six Sigma.

Once launched, SEP will provide a transparent, globally accepted system for validating energy performance improvements and energy management practices. SEP is accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the ANSI-ASQ National Accreditation Board (ANAB).

Origins of the Texas Pilots

The concept for SEP began several years ago when a group of industrial firms in Texas initiated a discussion with DOE's Industrial Technologies Program (ITP) about creating an energy efficiency program based on the Voluntary Protection Program (VPP) implemented by the U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The VPP is a cooperative program that recognizes industrial plants for effective, plant-level safety and health management systems and performance

Interest in this program took hold and after multiple discussions with various stakeholders a meeting was convened in 2007 in Washington, D.C. with representatives from federal agencies, ANSI, non-governmental industrial policy experts and representatives of U.S. industrial companies to explore and shape a preliminary program concept. One important outcome of the meeting was the formation of steering committee to develop the program, which eventually turned into U.S. CEEM. The need to pilot the program was evident from the beginning and some of the companies that initiated the discussion stepped up to test the program at one of their plants.

Piloting the Program

SEP was piloted from 2008 to 2010 in four industrial plants in the state of Texas: Cook Composites and Polymers' Houston plant, Freescale Semiconductor, Inc.'s Oak Hill plant, Owens Corning's Waxahachie plant and the Union Carbide (a subsidiary of the Dow Chemical Company) Texas City plant, which includes two plants. Over the course of this 3-year period each of the plants provided substantial feedback to U.S. CEEM, which used this feedback to make design improvements in the program. The five plants that were certified by April 7, 2011 achieved conformance with an energy management standard and verified energy intensity improvements of between 6.5% and 17% over a 2 to 3 year period.

Because the program was still in development at the time the pilots began, program elements underwent a test and improve process. One example was with the best practices scorecard. The original scorecard assigned more weight to certain energy efficiency measures, making it difficult for plants that could not implement those types of measures, due to their manufacturing processes, to earn points. After assessing this feedback, the Council directed that the best practices scorecard be re-scoped to make it applicable to a wider variety of industrial plants. Also, an innovations category was added to the scorecard to enable plants in every subsector and under any regulatory system to earn points.

The Road Ahead

Once the Texas pilots were well under way and the basic framework of SEP was determined, additional SEP demonstrations were begun in other regions of the U.S. Currently, 23 plants are undergoing SEP certification in six separate regions: the northeast, the northwest, the mid-Atlantic, the southeast, and a region encompassing California, Colorado and Texas. U.S. CEEM continues to examine feedback from the participating plants to further refine the program. Once SEP is officially launched, U.S. CEEM will continue providing strategic guidance to the SEP program administrator as the program grows and reaches many more U.S. industrial plants.