Reduce energy consumption and wastage with a Retrofit?! Yes, you can!
16/12/2019 Geyser Energy
All too often there is little or no time to carry out a proper, holistic review of energy usage and costs. In many cases, the demand and cost on manpower has become too great, whilst the price of traditional energy sources continues to go only one way.According to a designer of thermal energy and water solutions, there is an increasing demand for help, but how does a busy manufacturer go about finding what is best for them - especially in a crowded renewable energy industry where there seems to be no shortage of claims about saving money?
Replacing an old oil-fired boiler with a better, alternative resource
Lolli Olafsson, CEO of Geyser Thermal Energy is no stranger to that priority of wanting to get a process right - and when he sees heat or water being wasted, he despairs. Following in the footsteps of two of the highest qualified heating engineers (his father and grandfather), a young Lolli understood the finer workings of heat pumps before his tenth birthday - but today you'll find his company perhaps more likely to be in the throes of replacing an old oil-fired boiler with a better, alternative resource that is either untapped, or simply going to waste.
"I'm all for renewables", says Olafsson, "but when speaking to those in the process and manufacturing industries looking to reduce their carbon footprint and save money on soaring energy bills, I can understand that they're a bit overwhelmed with possibilities - some of which are based only on results in a laboratory or for new buildings".
'We often hear that retrofitting isn't possible or viable, but we're happy to prove them wrong'
Olafsson is quick to emphasise that his business isn't about a warehouse full of equipment waiting to be sold; it is about looking at and understanding what resources a company has -and then working closely together to harness the energy and control it.
"Most of the manufacturing sites we work with are of an age, often with additional buildings that have been bolted on", he continued.
"It would be ridiculous and financially not viable at all to remove all their plant and start from scratch, so to improve energy efficiency it's a question of making new technology fit in with the old. We often hear that retrofitting isn't possible or viable, but we're happy to prove them wrong. Typically, we find that the controls for the different systems of heating and cooling are not talking to each other, not integrated, so we would look to balance out the load system so that resources are used as efficiently as possible and often re-used - for example, capturing waste heat at the end of a process and reuse it the following day for the beginning of the next process".
Geyser Thermal Energy often introduce heat pumps to capture an external resource or boost low grade heat to make it useful and controllable - but at a retrofit installation for a company that produces components for the automotive and rail industries, oil is already being heated to 250 degrees and then cooled. Here, Olafsson's solution to help the company stop wasting huge amounts of heat, has been to balance out the load system between the heating and cooling at the near 30-year-old plant, utilising heat exchangers to capture the heat from the cooling of the oil and then storing the heat. This can now be used very efficiently and effectively to pre-heat almost everything in the factory from primary to secondary equipment.
Interestingly, the same principles apply with a new Geyser installation for a food manufacturer, where large amounts of heating, cooling and therefore water are required. Controls have been integrated so that they no longer work independently - and for the heating and cooling of water, energy is now economically transferred between the two - without the need for a chiller and a boiler.
'Eliminating the need for costly and inefficient oil-fired boilers that run at high temperatures'
The hotel and leisure sector is also benefitting from focussing form reviewing its energy usage. At the Oxfordshire Golf Hotel & Spa, Geyser Thermal Energy have installed a system that takes water from one of the golf course lakes to use as a heat source, which together with a retrofit of existing plant room systems is eliminating the need for costly and inefficient oil-fired boilers that run at high temperatures. Even though the installation will continue to be fine-tuned for optimum performance, energy costs have already been reduced by one third. Again, this is the supposedly unachievable retrofit, not new-build.
"Water usage is also slowly becoming more of an issue for the manufacturing industry to address", continued Olafsson, "but carbon emissions from it are still overlooked. Having to cool raw materials - across numerous industries - pre-production, during manufacture and post-process requires large volumes of water - and with carbon emissions and the cost of wastewater disposal sometimes double or treble that of water being supplied, there is another huge opportunity for savings and energy recovery and reuse. With both heat/cool/water systems, we typically see an impact on the bottom line from between three to five years; sometimes in as little as 12 months".
For more information, please contact:
Geyser Energy
5 The Polaris Centre
41 Brownfields
Welwyn Garden City
Herts
AL7 1AN
Tel: +44 (0) 1707 830 600
Email: info@geyserenergy.co.uk
Web: www.geyserenergy.co.uk
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