Siegburg. What can companies do to sustainably reduce their energy needs while maintaining their competitiveness? The current situation forces action: due to the Russian attack on Ukraine and the significant price increases on the energy markets, businessmen find themselves in an extremely tense and financially burdensome situation. Already in August, the federal cabinet approved two ordinances for the saving of electricity and gas, which are intended to contribute to security of supply.
Taking prevailing circumstances as an opportunity, the city’s economic development agency offered an information event in the city’s museum auditorium on Wednesday to take a look at short- and long-term solutions. Dr Nicole Freiberger, Effizient-Agentur NRW, and Thorsten Schmidt, Rhein-Sieg Energy Agency, provided specialist information on specific savings measures, existing subsidies and best practice examples, while Dr Andreas Esser of Rhein-Sieg-Netz GmbH explained the current supply situation in the energy market.
Category 1 interventions, which also concern, but not limited to, companies: replacement of traditional light sources with LEDs, switching off the external lighting, reducing the ambient temperature, limiting the supply of hot water, raising awareness of users. The list is long. These steps help reduce short-term energy consumption.
Category 2: In the longer term, however, more far-reaching action is needed through rethinking, adapting and optimizing processes. Concrete examples have drawn attention from abstract theory to where there might be potential in practice. It was, for example, a painter from the furniture industry who, by moving from manual to mechanical production, was able to significantly reduce paint consumption, improve surface quality and reduce production times by up to 90 %. Free time that employees can invest in processing further orders in the future.
Another example: in order to reduce the amount of waste water and the consumption of chemicals, a brewery and a company renovated the brewery in the form of a holistic energy concept, established a new cleaning process and thus greatly reduced the high rate of beer waste and organic wastewater pollution from yeast and beer residues.
Additional keywords for improving resource efficiency could be energy management systems, the use of waste heat for processes, heat exchange, photovoltaic systems or the adaptation of the building envelope. The experts’ recommendation: use energy offers and public aid. Interested parties can obtain further information via the following links.
Find Energy Consultant
Subsidy control
NRW efficiency agency
Rhine-Sieg Energy Agency
