Connection technology and automation specialist WAGO now saves over a million kilowatt hours of energy at its production and logistics facility in Sondershausen in Thuringia – a gratifying achievement in energy conservation. The linchpin of this efficiency project is a combined heating, cooling and compressed air supply system.
WAGO Saves a Million Kilowatt Hours of Energy
Together with the Energy Efficiency department of the consulting firm Galek & Kowald GmbH, WAGO set out to achieve annual energy savings of this order. This example of best practices in action shows what a collaborative path to greater energy efficiency in industrial production can look like – with compressed air/CHP solutions, high-efficiency heat recovery and sorption cooling systems, both centralized and decentralized. The result: a reduction in primary energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Due to its innovative nature, the project is supported as a demonstration project by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) with European Union funds.
Hunting for Potential Improvements
The path to greater energy efficiency starts with the first step: finding out exactly where the potential lies in the system. This analysis of the status quo is essential for identifying optimization options. Achim Zerbst, WAGO Facility Manager and head of the Energy Management team, puts it in a nutshell: “Measure it or forget it!” With 80 measuring points, WAGO’s Sondershausen plant already had lots of existing measurement data, recalls Anne Häring, the energy efficiency project engineer on the Galek & Kowald team from nearby Mühlhausen who oversaw the efficiency project on the consultant side. “We got the rest through mobile measurements,” she reports. “The next step was to analyze the processes: Where is energy being used, and for what?”
