A STUDY shows a plausible path for an industrial sector that is 84 percent larger in 2050, yet uses 9 percent less energy than it does today. The Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) says a process called Integrative Design can help manufacturers reach that level of efficiency.

Energy-efficient industrial operations offer enormous potential for cost savings and environmental benefits. Energy efficiency often competes for capital in companies and in the marketplace. However energy efficiency investments offer significant paybacks quicker.

Companies do discover clean simple answers which solve problems at once, but that does not happen all the time, but there are occasions when there is a really clean solution that takes out so much capital expenditure and complexity. Sometimes designing for energy efficiency can involve something as simple as reducing bends and curves in piping. By using fat, short, straight pipes to reduce friction, pumping energy can be cut in the plant’s main heat-transfer pumping loop by at least 86 percent.

These are the benefits of Integrative Design, which optimises an entire system as a whole, rather than its parts in isolation, which helps to solve multiple problems simultaneously, creating multiple benefits from single expenditures, and yielding more diverse and widely distributed benefits that help attract broader support for implementation.

Comments

comments