While getting manufacturing and industrial buildings energy-efficient and sustainable can be a complicated task — doing so can improve overall operations, save your business money and better your bottom line.

Of course, getting an industrial building more energy-efficient is more challenging than a typical commercial building — targeting opportunities for efficiency is often easier in commercial buildings. Though it is more work and possibly riskier than commercial buildings, achieving energy efficiency in industrial buildings is certainly possible.

In today’s How to maximize energy efficiency in industrial buildings, we are going to look at some targets to consider when looking to improve the efficiency of your industrial building.

Consider a heat recovery chiller

While a heat recovery chiller can produce hot water in excess it can also simultaneously produce chilled water for hydronic cooling systems. There are a number of models available and consulting an engineer or expert could help you select the right one that will benefit your business the most.

Aggressive lighting strategies

A clever strategy to get energy-efficient is to check out opportunities for integrating lighting system occupancy sensors into the HVAC system as it will avoid wasting energy when it comes to ventilation where and when it’s unnecessary. It saves both on lighting and ventilation — why would you want to provide these things in an unoccupied space anyway?

Get a facility manager on board with energy efficiency

Unfortunately, efficiency isn’t always such a priority for companies in the industrial sector.

“At most facilities, energy efficiency ranks below safety, meeting environmental regulations, and productivity,” reports Greentech Media, “So getting a facility manager to care about energy use requires a lot more than walking in with a cool-looking dashboard. Industrial customers are very risk-averse and will not make changes to existing processes if they could jeopardize the flow of operations.”

Getting a facility manager that values energy efficiency and who is willing to take the necessary risks in efforts to improve both the efficiency and operations of a company is important.

While savings don’t come as consistently or smoothly in industrial buildings as they do in commercial ones, getting energy-efficient is still worth it. Energy efficiency is a green business decision, after all.

 

For businesses getting energy-efficient, we have incentives.

 

Image credit: LostMyHeadache