Plant energy efficiency
Industrial facility superior energy performance
Initiated by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Superior Energy Performance (SEP) is a voluntary energy efficiency certification program for industrial plants. It is designed to promote greater energy efficiency in U.S. industrial/manufacturing plants by making energy management an integral part of plant operating practices and providing a roadmap to achieve continual improvement in energy efficiency while maintaining competitiveness. SEP is based on ISO 50001 requirements, a global energy management standard in development and backed by American National Standards Institute (ANSI)-certified measurement and verification of savings claims. The U.S. Council for Energy-Efficient Manufacturing (CEEM) is guiding development of SEP. CEEM recognized the need to establish internationally accepted standards for energy efficiency, enforced by an accepted certification, since many manufacturers have global operations; this would also provide a foundation for reporting energy savings and related carbon emission reductions.
Project
The measurement and verification (M&V) process is challenging due to the need to balance assurance of performance with the M&V cost. Inadequate M&V will compromise the value of reported energy savings and reduce potential to link savings to incentive programs, emissions trading schemes, and other related initiatives. SEP is designed to improve energy management systems for the entire facility, through capital investments, such as replacement of specific pieces of equipment, and subtle tightening of operating practices. Therefore, performance must be demonstrated in terms of facility-level consumption compared with a baseline period of three or more years earlier. Working closely with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a stakeholder team, KEMA served as the M&V protocol’s principal author. We designed the M&V protocol to document the percent reduction in facility-wide energy use on an “apples-to-apples” basis, normalizing for changes in production, weather, or other operational drivers. The M&V protocol will be incorporated as a normative reference to an ANSI standard, in development, that sets requirements to become SEP certified. The protocol was used in a pilot test of four industrial plants in Texas and is being applied in more than 20 additional demonstration plants.
Benefits
The M&V protocol is the first of its kind; it provides a standard methodology to evaluate plant-wide energy performance improvement in a global system. This consistent basis will gain facility visibility for a plant’s effective energy management system, and provide objective validation of performance improvement to outside entities.
Client
> Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and U.S. DOE
Project partners
> U.S. CEEM
> Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Public Policy
> KEMA Registered Quality
Project details
> Duration: July 2008 – December 2011 (anticipated)