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Scott Dunning, Electrical Engineering Technology Professor, University of Maine: "Well, certainly energy has become a prime topic for industry in Maine and internationally. With the rising prices of fossil fuels, now those energy conservation measures that may not have been attractive before suddenly are attractive. One thing I like to tell clients is that the best approach is the McDLT approach to energy conservation in your building. McDLT was a McDonald's product years ago, where they said we're going to take the hot side--the burger--and keep it hot, and the cold side--the lettuce, tomato--and keep it cold. They had packaging that would separate the two. We want to think about that in our facilities. We have plenty of sources of waste heat in our facility--we want to isolate that from areas we want to keep cold. I've been into facilities where they had a room on the floor with an air conditioner cooling the office, but the heat exhaust from the air conditioner was being vented out to the floor, and the floor you were trying to keep cool as well. We don't want to be doing that. We want to look at our building envelope. Consider your roof--do you have enough insulation in there? Years ago, it may not have been the fiscal approach to do because the payback wasn't there, but with the cost of our fossil fuels now, the payback is definitely there.
Oftentimes an air compressor is put in place because we need air for a specific application; however, once we get it in place, we tend to use it inefficiently. Air is a very expensive commodity. I don't want to use air to clean myself off. This is compressed air, high-pressure air--it does the job, but it's much cheaper to use an electric fan to blow something off. So, we want to use it as a precious commodity. To get one horsepower of air power, we may consume eight horsepower of electric power to do it. So, we want to look at that air compressor and say, 'How do I run it efficiently, and I want to use as little of its product as possible.' We also want to look at the equipment in our facility that does the heating and cooling--are we running it efficiently? Filters get clogged up over time, whether it's your oil filter or your air filter. Now is the time to be doing maintenance on that equipment to make sure it's running efficiently. A normal facility that we go into, we can probably save them at least 10% off their energy bills, and usually it's simple practices like that. Over the years that I've been in energy conservation, we've gone into over 200 plants in New England, and that's the average--about 10% energy savings."
