E116: Using Energy Treasure Hunts and Energy SWAPs to Engage Employees and Reduce Costs

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In March of 2024, the Iowa Sustainable Business Forum (ISBF) and Center for Industrial Research and Service (CIRAS) were still separate organizations, and they agreed to host a joint webinar to promote Energy Efficiency and Lean. I was fortunate to connect up with Paul Lemar, Jr. from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), who has extensive experience conducting these events. He explains how the process works in great detail, and I wrap up with a video and explanation on the Energy SWAP process between organizations.

The Treasure Hunt method combines Lean’s Gemba Walk approach with sustainability improvements, specifically around reducing energy usage and costs. This webinar will teach you how Energy Treasure Hunts and Energy Swap processes can help your organization find wasted energy in your operations, lead employees to embrace appropriate behavior changes and teach employees how to continue to look for future energy savings opportunities.

Energy can be a large budget item for many organizations, and it can also be the biggest driver of carbon emissions at your facility. Most organizations invest significant money into reducing energy through efficient equipment upgrades and renewable energy, but what if money is limited and the capital projects are going to take too long?

Using Lean methods, you can discover wasted energy that is being consumed on non-value-added activities, such as leaving equipment on during shifts and breaks, heating unused spaces, or letting your processes run longer than necessary. Many of these improvements are tied to employee behaviors or unclear documentation, so engaging them in the process of finding the energy reduction opportunities and explaining the business case is critical. Small process changes can often result in large benefits without the large capital investment.

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Have you ordered the book, “Lean Six Sigma for Good: Lessons from the Gemba (Volume 2)?” The book is made up of 8 chapters written about experiences from Lean and Six Sigma practitioners, to give you tips and tricks to help you work with nonprofits in your area. All proceeds donated to charity. Now available in audiobook as of Feb 2024. You can also order Volume 1 released in 2019.

Transcript

Good morning guys. Welcome, uh, to today’s webinar, uh, for the Iowa Sustainable Business Forum. Uh, my name is Justin Devoe with Casey’s General Stores. Um, we founding member and board member and I’m going to be your moderator for today’s event conversation. Um, for today is the second in an 8ah part series, um, talking about the advancements of energy efficiency technologies, innovative strategies to engage employees in energy reduction and the evolution towards sustainable transportation solutions. Each webinar will be recorded and posted in our ISBF library, um, for you to share with colleagues. A reminder, there is a member login that will be required for these videos. So today’s session is going to be led by Paul Lamar and Brian Hurley. Um, they will share how an energy treasure hunt and energy swap processes can help your organization find wasted energy in your operations. Um, it’ll lead employees to embrace appropriate behavior changes and teach employees how to continually look for energy savings opportunities. Um, all without a large capital investment. First speaker, Paul. He has more than 30 years of experience in engineering, economic and environmental analysis of energy efficiency technologies and management practices. Since 2009, he has served as a technical account manager for more than 20 better plants partners and under US Department of Energy Better Plants program. He’s a technical advisor. He develops energy intensity metrics, models and analyzes energy performance um, and structures ISO 50001 energy management systems. He’s also conducted more than 25 treasure hunts and energy assessments for industrial facilities in North America and Europe and consults regularly on combined heat and power as well as renewable feasibility and interconnection. His education he holds a mechanical engineering and MBA degrees from the University of Maryland. Our second speaker will be Brian Hurley. Brian is a lead Six Sigma Master Black belt at uh, Business Performance Improvement. Um, he’s a bachelor’s degree in statistics, a master’s degree in quality management and productivity and a certificate in sustainability, all from the University of Iowa. Uh, he teaches Lean and Six Sigma classes, facilities, workshops and events and performs statistical analysis and mentors employees throughout improvement efforts. Um, he volunteers his time with local nonprofits and is the author of the Lean Six Sigma for Good book series. Before we pass it off to those guys, quick little run through of the who we are as the Iowa Sustainable Business Forum. Um, the logos on your screen right now are our ISBF members. Um, a lot of familiar brands here in Iowa and across all different industries and retail and manufacturing. The top row there, that’s our founding members, our leadership members and all those companies have a board and member seat to help guide the ISBF towards our missions. Um, the middle section is our ISBF business members and then our bottom row is our academic partners. Together, ISBF members um help carry out improved practices um for energy efficiency to help impact people, planet and profits. We envision Iowa businesses as innovators and role models and sustainability. ISPF members have identified cost savings through workshopping together. And as an example of that, our UH Frontier Products was able to save almost $20,000 on a recycling solution that they identified during one of our roundtables and discussions. Webinars like the one today is one of our three programming events that we do. Uh, we also offer roundtables where we get together and discuss current sustainability challenges and questions and we also meet together for innovative tours of businesses businesses in Iowa. Our UM next in person event is planned for April 16th where we will meet in Ames to two or three facilities. Um, those are Danfoss, Workiva and the ISU Student Innovation Center. All of our learning and events are recorded to put into the member library. It’s compiled of all the webinars as well as notes from the tours and the roundtables. Um, everything is there that you can share with your colleagues and coworkers. And each ISBF member, um, can share that access with any of their employees at any time. We’ll have a Q and A session. Um, so if you have questions or think of ideas or things you want to ask either of our presenters during the presentation, you can type them into the Q and A box, um, at the bottom of your page, I believe at the end of the presentation after they’re done, we will go through those and ask those questions and get those answered for you guys. After that brief introduction here, um, I will pass this over to Paul and we will start our treasure hunt. Okay, so my name is, uh, again is Paul Lamar. I facilitate most of the treasure hunts we DO under the U.S. department of Energy Better Plants program. And if you’re not familiar with the Better Plants program, the voluntary initiative from the US Department of Energy, most of our partners have goals of reducing their energy intensity by 25% over 10 years. That’s kind of the standard goal. Some of the more energy intensive partners can set slightly, uh, lower goals. But the idea behind the program is a voluntary commitment to reduce energy intensity. And um, as part of that ah, commitment they report to the DOE how they’re doing and they also get technical assistance from the Department of Energy. Uh, and this is one form of technical assistance we provide are the, or the treasure hunts. And so this webinar I’m gonna, I’m just gonna go through uh, some, some uh, slides that we present to our partners when they’re about to hold one of these events. So it’s a great way to kind of get a sense for how we set up these events and what is entailed in both the preparation as well as the event itself. So I’m gonna go through some of the basics of uh, treasure hunts first. But the treasure hunts that we do are typically two to three day events and they’re focused on what we call day to day or operational energy efficiency improvements. So generally speaking they’re not um, you know, very uh, capital intensive improvements. Um, there are things like shutting off equipment, uh, um, changing the set points on equipment like thermostat settings, uh, sometimes putting in, you know, uh, recommending putting in sensors to turn off things automatically, maybe uh, you know, changing the standard operating procedures so that, so they include turning off equipment, things like that. But a key part of that is uh, identifying the equipment that can be shut off, uh, having a discussion with the plant team to make sure they agree with that and then quantifying what those savings will be. And over the process of that three, uh, day period, we keep repeating that process. Typically what we like to do if the facility is not running 247 is we come in on a Sunday. So we spend most of that day looking at what’s currently running and identify things that can be shut down. And then we also observe the plant on uh, Monday when usually production is underway, and then continue on into Tuesday, when most of Tuesday is kind of wrapping up, you know, our calculations and preparing a uh, report out presentation. We got started with these about 2010 to 2015 range. But before that Toyota had been doing these for a while. They got started in the late 1990s. They had an energy program and they found that when they talked to their employees, a lot of them didn’t know about the program. And so they felt like that was a block for them to get further improvement. Uh, they needed the employees to be engaged and to help the process. So they, they started these events, these treasure hunts where they set aside time for the employees to not have their normal responsibilities. Um, and they could, they could do the treasure hunt and then started doing those up to twice uh, a year. And they felt that this is a really good approach to a successful energy program. And they also then shared their best practices with other organizations and started a process where other organizations would also share with them. And that’s uh, a big part of Our program as well. So again the concept is that these are employees doing the treasure hunt. We provide facilitation, we come in and we train on the tools that uh, we have software tools as well as diagnostic tools, um, and we help um, them find um, equipment or measures that can be implemented. And we talk about what we see and what we think can be done. Uh, and we talk about what information or data we need to quantify the impact. And we go through that process many, many times over the period of the treasure hunt. But the benefit is that the participants, they gain that uh, skillset ability to do that themselves. And many of our partners that have done these start doing them on their own after we’ve finished. It’s fairly typical that almost all the savings opportunities will be under one year. Usually there’s some longer term savings opportunities. Those are ones that maybe involve some capital, sometimes like a lighting retrofit project or a variable frequency drive, something like that, maybe a longer payback. Um, but most of the stuff we’re talking about is under one year. From our experience what we’ve done, um, we were averaging about 8% savings over of our um, treasure hunts and then um, just recently it’s gone up higher. And we attribute that to a couple of different things. One is that we’re now using our measure software, uh, which is really streamlines uh the process of a treasure hunt allows you to very quickly capture the savings, get the data in there, calculate the energy savings, the, the GHG reductions as well and um, the payback and allows you to keep doing that so that you can collect a lot of different projects over that three, uh, day period. Um, the other, the other reason why we think that the events are doing better now is that um, we’re focusing more strategically on significant energy uses. And that’s one of the things we try to do in the middle of the treasure hunt is break down um, what the uh, facility energy uses are. The largest one ones and I’ll talk about that in a minute. But the recent hunts we’ve done, you can see here, you know, over the last uh, a little over a year, um, and just plants all over the country, um, a lot of uh, automotive or automotive uh, suppliers, um, and, but others like Owens Corning that does fiberglass or glass and leg and plaid, they do mattresses and a bunch of other things. Cleveland Cliffs is a very large steel producer. So we have a wide range of facilities that we’ve been um, doing the treasure hunts with. As far as the process goes, what we try to do when we, uh, start working with one of our partners on a treasure hunt is collect some basic information about their facility and maybe how they want to, um, execute the treasure hunt. So we’ll devise an agenda. And usually, again, usually these start on a Sunday. Um, if the facility is a 24 7, you know, if it’s running seven days a week, we will usually go in during the week because it’s just more convenient for everybody. But, but if not, we, we start on Sunday and then we, we continue through Monday and Tuesday. And the idea is that during that time we, we, you know, we, we go out into the plant. You know, we first, we, we do introductions and have some safety and briefings and, and things like that. Um, and then we break into teams and go out and plan. And once we go out in the plant, we’re looking for certain data, you know, equipment that can be turned off, how large that equipment is, how it’s running now, how limited we can make it run and still do what it needs to do and what the energy savings behind that measure would be. And so we keep doing that process, uh, over and over again until the three days are up, and we try to get as much treasure as we can during that time. The idea, again, we break into teams, we walk through the facility, we generate ideas, and then we go back and quantify those, uh, um, opportunities. When we do break into teams, we try to, we try to mix them up so that we got folks from different, uh, locations, different functional areas. Um, and then we give them a boundary. Sometimes the boundary is a systems level, like maybe some teams focusing on the air compressors, some focus on machinery, some focus on H Vac. Or we sometimes also do it, you know, building by building, but probably mostly by major plant areas like the one suggested here. Um, and generally speaking, we’re looking at maybe 12 to 30 attendees. 30 is a lot. Sometimes we’ve had even four or five. You know, so you can do it a lot of different ways, but the more attendees you have, it’s going to be easier to find more treasure. Um, but you can certainly do it with a handful of people as well. Sometimes, uh, folks like to assign team leaders ahead of the event. Uh, the most important thing is that each team has a representative from the host facility that can get them into the areas of the plant that are using energy. Um, for a lot of facilities, those, those areas are secure, so we need access to them, obviously. And then we also suggest that any attendees download the software tools ahead of time and bring laptops because that’s our biggest, uh, tool that we’re using is the software tool. When we start on Sunday, we’re going to have access to a number of diagnostic tools that allow us to measure energy use. But the tools that are probably most effective are eyes and ears. Because usually energy, you know, a motor is making, you know, some noise when it’s running. You know, lighting is different, it’s not making any noise, but then you can, you can see it. Those are our main things that we’re relying on. Sundays, it’s just, um, our eyes and ears. So we try to do our briefings very quickly and get started because the three days goes very quickly. And so we’re trying to find what’s running and whether it can be shut off. Sometimes it requires a discussion with the maintenance or production team. And sometimes we have to wait till Monday to even do that, you know. But we usually try to close the loop on those to make sure that what we’re proposing is in fact, uh, you know, should be able to be implemented. We like to take a lot of pictures if we can. Some plants don’t like that, and we have other ways of doing that. You know, taking notes or certain cameras that are approved because they don’t connect to the Internet, for example, we can do it that way. Um, but we try to also during this process collect data on their significant energy uses. And so it may be that if we see a bunch of motors that are used for exhausting air from the plant over processes, it could be that the exhaust systems are big or that there’s a bunch of ovens that are, uh, heating, um, parts for pink curing. So that could be big. And what we try to do is quantify those and compare them with the utility bills to see what’s the highest percentage of their energy use. And we try to limit that to maybe four or five different SCUs. That’s the way we try to look at it. To do all that. We mentioned eyes and ears, but we usually bring like an ir, uh, gun which measures temperature. IR camera which says the same thing but scans a broader area and does it gives you an image of, of the hotspots, for example. And then we use compressed air leak detectors to not only find the leaks, but, uh, to quantify the amount of air leaking. Um, that’s kind of how we get going on Sundays. And next want to go into the data and tools because this is the big, big part I mentioned of getting a lot out of the treasure hunt. It seems like a lot of time, but when you get going. And the teams are checking on equipment and touring the facility. It can go very quickly. And so you really need to try to be as productive as you can. We try to get as much as we can done before the event, collect data on, you know, utility bills. And we have discussions with the plant teams, if we can, about what, what they know of the facility. And usually they, uh, don’t know, like, what their, you know, highest uses are. But they do know if we got a lot of CNC cutting machines, if they have a lot of, uh, air compressors, they can tell you a lot of that information. From that, it can start to give us clues as to where to look when we arrive. That’s the floor time. And so we want to be productive during the floor time. So we try to do as much as we can in advance. So one of the things we do, and this is one we just did a couple weeks ago, a site in Texas. You know, we’ll look at the aerial view from, um, Google Maps. We can, you know, measure the square footage approximately using that and talk about the different buildings. And then the plant teams usually can tell us a little bit about what goes on in each building. And we decide how to spend our time. This site had multiple buildings. Some sites only have one, and that’s fine too. You know, then, then we just focus on the one building. Um, and then we usually ask if they have compressed air and whether they’re climate controlled. You know, some buildings are heated and not air conditioned, some are air conditioned, not heated, and some are both. You know, that’s important to note. You know, we summarize the utility bills just to get, not only get the total utility spend each year and the electric and gas rates, because when we’re doing our calculations, we want to have that, uh, handy. Um, but we also want to try to set a target. You know, we often go in with saying, okay, let’s, let’s try to get to 10% level. You know, that’s our kind of average level. You know, like I said, lately we’ve been going past that. But it’s kind of a, you know, a point during the, uh, event where you kind of, you get a measure, uh, of the savings that you’ve got so far, and then you start to feel good about it, or if you don’t have much yet, then you start to get a little stressed and, and you try to think about, well, where else can we look? And so we’ve been successful thus far. Most of our events are around 10% or higher, but Every time it’s a challenge and we don’t know what we’re going to find. One of the things we try to get, and this has been very, um, hit or miss, but try to get the granular utility data. And that usually has to be requested from the utility. Um, this case, this is daily data, but we often get it hourly. And it tells you quite a bit about how, uh, the facility runs during hot and cold periods. So it tells you kind of how the H vac systems are functioning. It tells you what’s going on on weekends, so you can see what their idle load is. And it can tell you what’s going on during peak production times. So you get a sense for how much does production add to the load. And so with that data, you can tell quite a bit, actually. It’s really informative. Um, it doesn’t answer every question, but it, it really helps you focus, uh, going in, if you can get that data. The second piece is really helpful to iron out ahead of time is, you know, what are the hours of the plant? You know, the shift one, shift two, maybe some shift on weekends where the hours of those shifts. You know, sometimes there are certain products that have different hours than other products. We try to lay all that out to get a calculation for idle hours, but for production hours as well. And it may vary by type of product that’s being produced. So like, for example, we were just at one, that one in Texas. I just showed, uh, it was about 45% idle hours and about 55% production hours. So then once we get all that data, we start setting up our software tool and, and we use our Measure tool. We call it Measure without an E. And Measure is a tool that’s been developed over the years for plant assessments. You know, it does more than treasure hunts. It does, you can do process heating, steam, compressed air systems. But when we do Treasure Hunt, you can see the red box around here. When we load the software, we click on that box, um, and we set up a new assessment and then start inputting, um, some basic facility information. And then we’re really set up at that point to start entering what we found in terms of potential projects. So if you need to find out where access, uh, to measure is, uh, here’s the links to it. Um, it is free to use so anybody can use it. You don’t have to be a Vetter Plans partner, and you don’t have to be in the US Either. You can still, um, access the tool inside the tool. Once you load the Treasure Hunt, uh, Module. It’ll give you access to uh, dozens of calculators. I think there are 70 or 80 of these and they all have different functions. Some of them are fairly specific. I will say that for treasure hunts, mostly what we’re using are the natural gas reduction, the electricity reduction. Those are the two in the, in the kind of the middle of the top row. And then the compressed air leak survey between those three. That’s, that’s probably 80 or 90% of the calculations we do in treasure hunts. The electricity reduction, here’s just a quick example of it. You know, in this case we’re saying the plant is idle 2760 hours. It pays 8 cents a kilowatt hour and we’re going to use a multimeter reading. And so we measured a certain motor and it was using 35amps. And so we’re going to shut that off, drop it down to zero. And so in doing so our numbers show that we’re saving 68,000 kilowatt, uh hours a year. Ah, so that’s going to be roughly around what, five or six thousand dollars of savings. So you know, if we keep doing those, you add those up, you know, if you get 10 or 15 of those, then you got a lot of savings uh, coming in. So that’s kind of what we do. Here’s an example of the one I was talking about before, uh, one of the uh, recent ones. And the interesting thing about these are all the measures we did over the three days. And this, this treasure hunt was unique, uh, in that it was almost all low hanging fruit. It was all shutting down equipment. Uh, there were some lighting projects but you know, we still consider that low hanging fruit. And then there was you know, the compressed air leaks and then maybe a little bit around the air compressors themselves. But you know that, that was the, you know, the measures we found. And you can see the dollar savings anywhere from you know, $100 to $25,000 for some of the bigger projects. But almost all those are under one year payback. There’s a couple that are just over one year and that one that’s um, that’s a um, six year. And that’s just. That one is because uh, it was in an office area and the hours operation were like uh, 2000 hours a year. So, so it was a, the savings weren’t quite as attractive simply because they’re just not on as much as some, the other lighting. We have these uh, diagnostic toolkits. They have a variety of different tools in them. Uh, we have data loggers and we have instantaneous measuring devices. You know, we can measure pressure, we can measure electrical current, we can measure lighting levels, we can measure air speed, we can measure the frequency of compressed air leak. We can measure all kinds of things. And these are the things you usually need to measure if you’re going to calculate the energy savings. Um, just a quick run through some of the opportunities we see. If you’re going to look to do some, your own, and then I’m going to flip it over to Brian. Their lighting, you know what we’re looking for there. A lot of folks, uh, haven’t converted all their LED lighting. So, um, if they haven’t, that’s a great opportunity. And if you haven’t been in a plant that’s got a mix of lighting, one of the things we look at, because sometimes it’s hard to see if it’s a fluorescent fixture and the light, uh, the bulbs have been recently replaced. You know, it looks pretty good, but if you look for a little bit of color variation, you know, the fluorescent pictures tend to like the ends of the tubes darken over time. And so that’s one way to see if it’s a fluorescent lighting. But even if it’s led, you can turn it off. You can see that picture on the far right is LED lighting that in a, in an outside area that was on during the day when there’s plenty of daylight. So, so that could have been shut down. So anyway, those are some of the things we look for, for lighting, um, for steam, you know, if you’re in a plant that has a boiler and steam systems, you know, we’re looking for steam leaks. And uninsulated surfaces are good areas for savings for treasure hunts, um, for compressed air. You know, mostly we spend a lot of time looking for leaks, um, but we can also look for other inappropriate uses, like if they’re using, uh, an airline to blow off an area that, that uses a lot of air, even just a single station. So we look to install nozzles, um, and then we do some other things with compressed air system, you know, we might look to reduce the plant pressure. In the plant we were just at, they have dryers that dry the air before it goes into the plant. And they were running all the time. And there’s different models, um, that you can get that cycle on and off with the compressors, and those have some pretty good energy savings. There’s a bunch of things you can look for in compressed air. But, you know, treasure hunt, you still want to keep it kind of basic if you can, you know, here’s a cost of leak, and this is even using 5 cents a kilowatt hour, an eighth of an inch leak is $2,100 a year. So if you have a higher electric cost than that, you know, it can be, um, much higher than that. A leak of 1/8 of an inch will make a lot of noise. And I’d be surprised if a plant let that go if it was down at the personnel level. But sometimes these leaks are up very high, and so you may barely hear it if it’s up 30ft in air. Sometimes we have to get up on a lift truck, uh, to see kind of what’s going on. Some others we look at fans, uh, exhaust. The key here is that if you’re exhausting air out of the plant, it’s not just the electricity used for the fan, but it’s the amount, uh, of energy you have to do to condition the replacement air. So if you’re exhausting 8,000 cfm of air, you have to bring in 8,000 cfm of air and heat it or cool it. And even if you don’t bring it in, it comes through, you know, cracks in the plant or things like that, you know. So the plan is going to be, you know, maintaining its own, uh, pressure, uh, level, uh, even if you’re exhausting air from it. And so that all that air coming into the plant, you know, will, Will go through your H vac systems at some point, and it’ll use energy to get that. So you need to consider that with exhaust systems. And it really can be quite significant savings to shut those down as much as possible. Now, process heating, this can be a little more involved. Uh, but we do look for some basic things. You know, look at the set points, understand how long it should be in the oven for and whether, whether the oven is on during times when there’s nothing in there. We see that a lot. Some of those things are what we try to control through a treasure hunt. The H vac systems, you know, if you’re, if you have cooling towers, you want to look for pumps that may not be using VFDs. That’s a big savings area. Um, but, you know, H VAC units, then you’re looking at things like thermostats and whether, um, those are set back at night. And then also if you have economizers, are they working? And you may need to even go up on the roof to find that out. And that when we’ve done that, that’s sometimes very helpful in terms of projects, process equipment can be a little more challenging because there can be a wide range of this. You know, what we’re basically looking in most cases is just to shut it down. And the plant we were just in, we found, I don’t know, maybe 30 different pieces of equipment running on a Sunday. We went around item by item and measured the amp levels and you know they were, it was significant savings uh, to get by turning all those on. I mentioned the significant energy uses. This is part of uh, uh, ISO5001. Uh, that’s a international energy management standard. And the SEUs are uh, one of the big uh, structural points of that standard. And so if you set those up, you know, from a treasure hunt, you get information on them, then you’re really taking a step towards setting up an energy management system and using a much more um, rigorous process around managing energy. So, so we see that as a, as a clear best practice and it’s a really foundational point to start from. Uh, we have a toolkit, here’s the link here. You can get some of the, you know, the sheets of paper, you know, where you can set up your own treasure hunt. Uh, we have the webinar recordings like this one here. You can access this one here apparently. But if you needed to uh, you know we have other recordings and then the diagnostic equipment loan. This is free to better plans partners and you can access it here. Uh, but you can also, if you want to just see what we have in that toolkit. Some of our partners end up buying some of the equipment on their own. If you have a lot of facilities, facilities. So with that I’m going to turn it over. I know Brian’s got some information to present and then see if there’s any questions. Thank you Paul. First question just around how do you feel your organization engages employees in efforts like this to educate or teach them or build that into the process of looking for energy production opportunities or making sure that energy is not being wasted. How would you rate that statement? Okay, looks like um, 44% disagree with that statement. 30, uh, 3% agree and 22% are neutral. Okay, so probably some opportunity there to get all the employees to start to notice and um, look m for these opportunities. Next one is does your company or organization or facility have a site wide goal to reduce energy usage? You know, is there a 5%, 10%, 15% reduction goal at your facility that you’re aware of? Okay, so 44% also agree and 22% strongly agree. So over half have some goal which is Great. Um, not too surprising if a lot of you are ISBF members. Yeah. If you have, ah, don’t have a goal and that’s not required to do energy treasure hunts. Um, but that definitely helps when you can show that there’s an importance from management leadership to look at these areas for opportunity. So thanks for that. Let me share a few slides here. Okay. So I just want to give a little background on my experience with energy treasure hunts. Uh, I used to work at Rockwell Collins, now it’s called Collins Aerospace, based in Cedar Rapids. I worked at a couple different facilities when I joined in 1999. Um, they had a lean program they’d already started. And so um, I think tying in employee engagement as part of process improvement initiatives and then tying that to these energy reduction projects is a very good um, opportunity there. So they already had some structure in place to try and look for opportunities of improvement and get teams and engaged in that process. So I think that really helps, but it’s not required. And these treasure hunts can be a great way to get that engagement going that can create other opportunities for improvements across the organization, not just on energy. So in 2009 I was part of a team that helped put together uh, a goal for carbon reduction that was driven by one of our customers, said you should have a goal. We want our suppliers to be looking at these types of things. So we found the energy treasure hunt process. We called it a go and see, kind of like a Gemba walk. We did a pilot in one of our circuit board shops. It was the largest user. It had leadership support behind it and it was isolated in our substation monitoring so we could isolate their usage completely to a specific substation. So that made it a really good opportunity. And uh, through that effort we identified about $60,000 in opportunities that went really well. And we expanded it to a total of six events over a two year period. And it covered four different facilities. So we wanted to get out to other sites and show them the uh, potential in getting these types of methods going at their sites. And we used a very similar process that Paul walked through, going in off hours, going through normal production time, looking at shift changes, looking at startup and shutdown at the end of shifts, and just trying to look for uh, opportunities at different times of day, listening for air leaks and things like that. And that was one of the things we really focused on was the air leaks. Um, there was a lot of opportunity there. From what we could hear, it’s kind of interesting those become more visible when you’re there on off hours, during the day, it’s noisy, and you don’t hear some of those opportunities like Paul talked about. So, um, at night, it was much more evident what was going on. And throughout our six events, we had about $200,000 of opportunities identified. Um, and we’re able to train and educate employees to get them to start noticing these things in their processes on a regular basis. So it’s not just this event where we spot these opportunities, but they notice it all the time. Like I noticed that leak over there. My machine is running a little strange. It sounds funny. There’s something rattling in there. There’s something wrong with the motor. It’s probably consuming more energy than it norma does. So just having them be that front line of, uh, identifying opportunities, that’s really powerful. The, ah, other thing I want to talk about was this Better Buildings Challenge swap. And so I’m going to play a video here that gives a good overview of it. But it’s basically an, uh, opportunity for two different organizations who have already kind of looked at their own facilities and then have a new set of eyes come in and take a look at it from a new perspective. And so they swap and have each team go to the other facility, other company, and look for opportunities with that different lens and things that might get overlooked or not noticed. The whole reason we do the better building swap is because we know we can be better. So I’ve walked hundreds of hotels. This is the first time that I’ve had the opportunity to swap and walk a store. I’ve never seen three guys in suits standing in a kitchen. All that air is just losing itself. That’s technology that in a lot of cases, would have been upgraded years ago. I mean, you multiply it by that size, just a dollar a square foot is $1.4 million. We are used to having to clean up the Navy’s mess. When this was built, they called it the palace for the people. You want to mess with the palace. Whoa. Little cold blast of air right there. I wonder if it’s supposed to be putting cold air in here in December. Wow. It looks like it’s almost 300 degrees. And look at all that heat they’re losing out of the top portion there. That stop sign is getting a ton of wind. So it’s moving. It’s being pushed by something. It’s awesome that we were able to connect and we’re able to share those best practices between two different industries. I was honestly shocked by when you start looking for waste, how easy it is to find it every swap we do, we learn more and more. The more we have the opportunity to profile what leaders are doing so others can learn, the greater chance we have as a country moving forward. It gives you a little bit of overview of the swap process. But the great thing is that we all have organizations nearby that we can reach out to or partner with. They’re not really competitors with each other. So I think that makes it easier. And some of these opportunities, there’s no competitive advantage around it. This is just about energy usage. So even if you had a competitor, you could exchange ideas around, uh, energy reduction opportunities. You might have similar equipment and things like that. So I think that’s really cool part about the swap processes, new set of eyes kind of reinvigorate some of your efforts. You, uh, get to learn from each other. Um, I’m sure there’s other learnings that come out of these efforts, uh, that are beyond just the energy saving as well. So they put together four different seasons. Those are the four different groups that they highlighted. And so you can see it’s not just manufacturers, it’s government agencies, it’s military. And so this works for any type of organization. They highlighted on their website a typical uh, activity that they did for the first season, which is Whole Foods and Hilton. They uh, spent the first day and a half doing a full examination of the systems of Whole Foods. And then they did the same thing at the Hilton site. And there’s a couple videos that highlight what they learned. So it goes into more depth on that. They looked at everything from the lighting, the H vac, energy management systems, uh, even the customer and employee engagement, especially with very, uh, visible, uh, consumer products like hotels and grocery stores. They did a night walk to uncover additional opportunities so they could see what was going on, but operations are slower. Uh, then there was an unveil where each team discussed the observations and recommendations to the other teams that’s highlighted in the video. So on that link you can go and find all those different videos, but at least go through one of the seasons and one of those organizations just kind of see the process and some of the findings they had. So I think that’s a great way, ah, to also get the number of opportunities identified by uh, just bringing in some new set of ops. So a couple different links there. There’s a better climate challenge, there’s a better buildings challenge. That might be something your organization want to look into or participate on. Also with energy treasure hunts, uh, Paul gave a lot of good information that the ORNL website has available you can access Energy Star also has some processes and documentation you can follow. There uh, are some better buildings energy treasure hunt training material you can look at, uh, more information about the swap and FAQs. Like what are some of the common questions you run across? I did some documentation of some of the work at Rockwell. Um, there’s a paper and then there’s an article I published in a magazine about some, a little more details about that uh, effort that we did. So those are the main things I wanted to cover. I had a question for Paul. When you’re looking at the hourly or monthly or weekly data, uh, on electricity usage, since sometimes it is seasonal, do you compare like year over year comparisons on each month to try and look at savings to get into that detail or does that measure tool handle the seasonal aspect? Well, we do, we definitely look at the seasonal. I mean it’s usually, it’s a lot of data, you know, so uh, when we, when we request it, it’s usually for a year or less. But um, I, I have seen other projects where you were looking at, you know, the trending of certain, like, like when we do more of a systems level assessment then, then we might look at multiple years. But for a treasure hunt, usually it’s just one year. Um, but as far as the seasonal data, it’s really interesting because you’ll see, um, the lowest point will uh, be usually your like uh, April or September, you know, when, when there’s no heating or cooling going on. And so that’s a good, good time to gauge what your production’s doing. And then obviously June, July, August, and you know, maybe a little bit in September, you’re getting your cooling load going up. So you’ll see that go up. But also look at how it goes up, uh, you know, during the day versus during the weekend, you know, because, um, you know, in the weekend nobody’s there. And you know, are there temperature setbacks, you know, on those H VAC units? Because if the thermostats are not setting back on weekends, you might see a peak load on a Sunday and you’re like, gosh, you know, that’s a lot of energy. But you also have to temper that. You know, you want to uh, like make sure that those units are back on, you know, by 6am on Monday morning so that the plant, when they come in, it’s not super hot, you know, so you have to um, give them time to get the plant back up to temperature. Uh, um, but that data is very, very helpful for many things. Um, you know, the Other thing is like, if you look at it on a, on a Sunday in April, let’s say, so you shouldn’t have air conditioning or heating going on. How low does it get? You know, because if it’s, if it’s 50% of the peak load, then there’s a lot of things still left running on weekends. But if it drops down to very low levels, then maybe, maybe they are shutting off a lot. So, um, so, so there’s a lot of different, you know, questions you can ask of the facility and get answers just from the data. And it doesn’t answer every question, doesn’t tell you what’s running. But, but if you know the patterns like the H VAC units and, and the production, you know, patterns that you can, you can start to ferret out what’s going on. Um, you know, with the equipment. When we looked at the data, you know, and you could see the hourly fluctuations and when this people came in, the shift started and then people left. And then what really caught our attention was the fact that there was a set amount of baseload energy being used. It was 60% of the total on nights and weekends. And so that really focused our attention over to what is running on, uh, nights and weekends. That’s where there’s a lot of opportunity. Yeah, we expect some fluctuation of production, but that baseload was way higher than expected. That was really eye openening. And it sounds like you determined it was the air. Uh, compressors were a big chunk of that. You know, that’s that H vac. The heating and cooling was constant, day and night. It was the same. So there’s no setback on the temperatures. That was another big opportunity. All right, Paul, we got one more question that came through here. Sure, sure. Um, is there a set or average cost for the treasure hunt or is it variable based on the company in site? For us, it’s, um, I mean, it’s a little bit variable. And then, you know, the travel will, you know, if it’s in, you know, Washington state or California, for example, it’s going to be more expensive just that piece of it. But in general, the costs are the same for most of our partners. You know, in the Better plans program, they do it on a, um, it’s a proposal process where they submit an application and they get awarded the event. They can choose whether to submit cost share or not. Uh, lately, uh, to win the events, most of our partners are putting in a little bit of cost share. So I can just say anecdotally, it Seems like It’s maybe around 4k or so that they’re putting in. We kind of ballpark the events around $10,000, but that varies a little bit depending on travel cost. Uh, and that, you know, even though we, we’re doing these under the Better Plans program, you know, there, there are providers that we use that can do it outside of the program if you wanted to do that. And, you know, like, Brian showed that they’ve done it too. So, um, but. But in terms of our program, that’s kind of how it works. It’s really supposed to be a free service from the program. But, um, we do a scoring process and if they, if they add cost share, then it helps their score. And so lately most of our partners have been willing to share the cost, um, kind of with that, I guess. When you do the treasure hunt, um, you talk about like, the team that goes, is it members of the Better Plants program along with obviously your facility employees that you’re going to, or how do you. What does the team look like? So the Better Plants, like if an organization joins a better plan, so all their employees are, you know, part of the program too. So, um, usually. So the treasure hunts, when they submit the application, they will indicate whether there are. They are open to folks from outside the organization. So if they, if they check that box off and they don’t get, you know, more than, let’s say 12 people or 15 people sign up for it, then we usually make it open to other partners as well. And so, and it does help, you know, Brian’s point about, you know, uh, having another set of eyes. I mean, we had some, where, uh, another partner, they sent a couple like young engineers or something to this event. And they find, you know, they’re really paying a lot of attention to what’s going on and they’re finding things that’s helping the plant. By and large, those folks are mostly from the host organization. You know, if there’s extra room, we open it up to other partners. But within that host organization, we usually encourage them to bring in, uh, people from other sites. So usually there might be, let’s say 80% of the people are from the host site and another, you know, 10% or let’s say maybe 60% host site, 20% from other plans, and maybe, you know, 10 or 20% from other partners. So we get a mix of people. Thank you, Paul and Brian, again. Um, it was a great presentation. Appreciate all the information you guys shared and everybody on the webinar. Thank, um, you guys again.

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