Imagine this for a second: You are tasked with coming up with ideas for saving energy and reducing the carbon footprint at a manufacturing plant. The idea makes perfect sense, but how do you actually go find these opportunities? The plant just looks like it's made up of miles of pipes in the ceiling, wires in conduit, and conveyor belts all over the place. How do you find ideas for saving energy? You may not even have to imagine that. This may be the exact situation you are in right now, and I have been there too.

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I was in this situation as an energy consultant. I had been to multiple plants assisting other experience energy auditors, but had never taken the lead myself. So when I was eventually assigned to lead an audit myself, I thought I would have no idea what to do! This company was paying us a huge fee for me to spend a week at their site, find projects to help meet their sustainability goals, and present them at the end of the week to the key stakeholders; oh sh**. I couldn't simply copy the audit styles of the senior engineers I had previously worked with because they would freestyle their assessments, easily bouncing from one system to the other, and finding projects in ways I didn't understand. For me to pull this off, I knew I had to come up with a system to follow. I started with the obvious strategy of asking my buddy Google for help. Surprisingly, I did not find anything helpful for conducting an industrial energy assessment. To this day I still haven't found anything very helpful online. Plan B was to use my own method. I was solid at calculating energy savings for projects once they were explained to me, so I started there and worked backwards. I started developing a strategy for every type of system I could encounter (boilers, chillers, air compressors, etc.), and listed out how energy could be saved based on the fundamental equations associated with those systems. Luckily, some patterns started to emerge from system to system. I found that there is a relatively simple way to measure the baseline performance of a system, and then finding ways to lower the energy usage of those systems based on changing the variables related to their energy usage. Long story short, I managed to find 26 energy savings opportunities and the plant was thrilled with the opportunities they had. I have since completed several more of these assessments using the same system and had similar results as the first time. Now that I have moved on from my previous company, I am documenting everything I have learned about industrial energy efficiency and sharing actionable steps to identify energy projects, calculate the business cases, and successfully realize those savings.​​