Decreasing the Primary Energy Demand in the Industrial Sector By Modifying and Linking the Energy Flows in a Plastic Factory (ST-16-C016)

Energy efficiency in the industrial processes  has great potential to reduce the energy demand, as well as green house gases emission, which is the most concerned topic in the gobal warming debate. In fact, the improvement of energy efficiency and an intelligent linkage of the energy consumer, distribution, storage, and energy supply are the keys to lower the energy consumption in the industry. In this paper, the research is focused on the study of these combinations in the industry via a plastic factory case study at different climate conditions. The plastic processing industry uses mainly electric power for their machines and facilities. Especially, plastic products for the food and pharmaceutical sector requires significant demands on air temperature and humidity control. This leads to high energy requirements on the power supply system. In order to obtain flexibitlity in using machines from many different energy sources such as CHP processes, the burning of gas, or electrical grid, the electrical heating method is changed to thermal oil heating in many production machines. The reconstruction of many molding machines, building techonolgy, and the thermal grids in the plastic factory enhances the use of heat generated by a CHP unit. In addition, by changing the refrigeration supply from a compression to an absorption chiller, the use of the heat is increased even further. From a case study presented, the primary energy demand is lowered by up to 57 percent. The study shows the energy savings potential for a manufacturing company located in three different locations: in Germany, Canada and the USA.