“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance”
Staff Training offers many advantages :
- improves skills and knowledge
- boosts involvement in the job, performance, satisfaction and morale
- improves productivity, time management
- reduces turnover and prepares for higher responsibilities
Staff background is usually very diverse, with qualifications ranging from technician to doctoral level, with different career paths, very diverse job experiences and hierarchical responsibilities. Hence, Trainee groups are a very heterogeneous audience for Trainers.
For all these reasons, Planet Decarb Trainers put a special emphasis on Training and Communication techniques.
With a teaching experience of 30+ years on four continents and very different cultures, our Experts developed appropriate techniques to formulate very complex concepts with appropriate wording. Training Modules are built to enable trainees with various backgrounds to progressively acquire a common terminology. Extensive use of metaphors is made to translate “first principles” and physics laws into wording that becomes accessible to all.
Instead of teaching “Cooking recipes” for Energy Efficiency, we do our best to develop and transmit generalized methodologies that can be memorized and easily applied.
Our Trainers blend the best teaching styles, with short formal presentations, activities to involve the audience and by promoting self-learning, and critical thinking. Full advantage is taken of the resources available on-line, from equipment suppliers, academia and Institutions.
We make ours this saying : “Give a man a fish, and he will be hungry again tomorrow; teach him to catch a fish, and he will be richer all his life.”
TRAINING MODULES
Energy Management
Depending on the Staff training needs, the duration ranges from 2 to 5 days, with a typical programme spreading over 3 days. The ideal attendance is 8 to 12 people. A the listing shows, there are three main parts:
- understanding the use of energy in a typical site and macroscopic analysis
- main Utilities (description, operating principles, energy savings)
- general methodologies and action plan building
At the end of each part, time is taken for debrief, feedback and questions. All the learning material is illustrated during the site visits. That is why it is essential that this Training Module be taken on a site with a maximum number of Utilities equipment (compressors, boilers, chillers, HVAC, pumps, etc…).
Extensive use is made of audio and video materials to enable trainees to fully understand the principles on which the equipment works, and the most important levers available to generate energy savings.
- Introduction to Energy
- Concept of Unit Operations for industrial processes
- Site Energy Analysis
- Smart Energy Management
- Heat exchangers and heat recovery
- Pumps & Fans
- Compressed Air
- Combustion & boilers (Hot Utilities)
- HVAC & R (Cold Utilitiies)
- Buildings
- General methodologies for building an Action plan
- Decarbonation: strategies, roadmap, technologies
- Visits to equipment on site
ENERGY WORKSHOPS
Building an Energy Action Plan to reduce consumption
Site Managers (Production, Maintenance, Energy, etc) often “undergo” mandatory Energy Audits as a hardship, mainly due to time constraints, but also because they go through these audits as if “someone is looking over their shoulder”. Hence, Energy Auditors do not receive the amount of information and data that is necessary to cover in an exhaustive way all the potential energy savings actions. Therefore, the Energy Auditors very often limit their recommendations to a common set of actions that are widely known, and more or less easy to quantify. The consequence is that the Site’s Staff are often deceived by the quality of the Energy Audit outcomes.
To enhance the quality and quantity of recommendations, Planet Decarb Experts take a whole different approach and conduct “Energy Workshops”, which are run on a Brainstorming mode. Typically, a plant is divided into a small number of processing steps, often corresponding to the areas of the floorshop and the common Utilities. For each process/manufacturing area, a brainstorming session is carried out with the main stakeholders, ie, the area technicians and engineers. These are instructed the “3C” method and invited to generate and discuss energy savings actions. Since the Staff is now involved, ideas specific to the area are generated – by the zone’s staff itself. In addition to leading the brainstorming and proposing recommendations based on his/her expertise, the role of the facilitator is to evaluate the Staff’s ideas, estimate the associated energy gains, the corresponding investment, and provide feedback from the experience of similar sites and processes. Because of their involvement, the Staff make its own the recommened actions and their potential energy saving. The selected actions will be implemented and follow-up will be carried out by the same personel, who now take Responsability. This “Staff empowered” method has been extensively applied to the most prestigious Companies sites, with excellent feedback and results.
Typical On-site Energy Workshop Planning
- Prevention & Safety Plans
- Team Introduction
- Process & Utilities overall presentation
- Process & Energy Questions (production, energy consumption and KPIs)
- Process sections presentation – Site visit
- Presentation of past/current energy saving measures
- Presentation of processes requiring hot utilities – Consumption patterns
- Site visit : hot utilities
- Data collection and analysis
- Cold Utilities
- Site visit
- Data collection and analysis – ENERGY BREAKDOWN for non measured items
- Synthesis – Discussion –
- Utilities (Compressed air, waste water…)
- Site visit
- Detailed presentation of consumers
- Listing and discussions – preliminary ECMs (Energy Conservation Measures)
- Plan for data collection and future actions to be taken
- Wrap-Up meeting
ENERGY HOTLINE & STAFF COACHING
Coaching and Assistance to Staff
As a continuity to Staff Training, we propose to coach your Staff for their energy continuous improvement program. Planet Decarb can provide consulting to bring its expertise (preliminary studies, equipment design, troubleshooting, equipment specifications, commissioning, proposal critical review,..)
Site Energy Monitoring
Planet Decarb offers to follow-up your Energy Performance progress. Energy Data must be made available.
Your Energy Baseline will first be established, using the most influencing parameters (production, raw materials, production time, weather data…).Your consumption will then be followed-up for each equipment with power monitoring. As the figure above shows it, real site consumption can be compared with the theoritical (“model”) consumption. Showing the evolution of both consumption and influencing factors will give more insights and more recommendations to better energy usage.
After improvement project actions have been implemented, follow-up is necessary to monitor and check performance. This monitoring provides feedback and enables corrective actions if required.
