Developing in house personnnel to save energy

1. I have been involved in energy management at the start of my career as an energy consulting engineer. One of our services was to conduct energy audit for our clients. On top of that we were also conducting training on how to perform energy audit to various level of technical personnel.

2. Later I joined a facility management company and one of our services is to provide operation and maintenance services for facilities equipment such as air conditioning and compressed air systems, lighting and etc. During my tenure as a facility engineer in a manufacturing plant, I have full control on all day to day operational and maintenance works for all that equipment. With my knowledge and experiences in energy management previously as a consultant, it took me little time to apply my know-how to save energy at that plant. It did not take me too long to show the result for energy saving measures that I implemented since I have all the resources to do that. Using available data that has been collected as apart of O&M data collection, I developed a simple format to use the collected data and later presented it to the management to indicating results of my efforts.One of simple measure that showed significant result was a optimizing the operation hours of each chiller based on chilled water requirement throughout the day.

3. In the same time I personally trained 2 of my technicians who were very experienced and familiar in running, maintaining and even repairing some of there equipment. My job became much easier when they were involved because they could see additional contributions that they can deliver other than they routine O&M works.

4. When I did more works as energy efficiency consultant for more manufacturing plant and commercial buildings after that, I can conclude that it would be more cost effective if existing resources or internal personnel could be utilized to perform energy management related tasks. I remember charging at least RM20-30 thousands just to perform energy audit for a medium size plant or building.

5. Throughout the energy audit exercise key technical personnel in each plant or building involved with me so much especially in getting data required and for me to understand on each process and how they run they facilities equipment. The later part of the job is to recommend energy saving measures based on my understanding of all that and data that I have analyzed.

6. At some points of my works as a consultant, I had thoughts that why couldn't they do that themselves since they are the one who know more than anybody else about their equipment and they are willing so pay much to consultants like us to do that. Yes, they are some areas where consultants may have their own expertise but some of them are purely based on they existing data and input obtained from the clients especially personnel at the floors.

7. I did asked some of them and typical answers mainly are they are too occupied with their daily tasks and never being trained to do it. I know some of them who are technically very good and competent which normally make my job much easier with their input and helps. However, they main focus is only to ensure all equipment under their care to run without interruption with no or very little attention being given to ensure it run a the most efficient ways possible.

8. Some prominent companies especially MNCs do have their trained personnel to develop and implement energy management initiatives in their plant and normally their plant give a consultants like us much more challenging time to come up with something more than what they have already done.

9. Japan is a country with so many successful stories utilizing employees in factories and buildings to achieve their energy saving targets. They introduced and promoted a small group activities in identifying energy saving potentials and improve energy intensity performance in their plant. These small groups are consisting of personnel at the operational level and being supervised by engineers in the same plant.

10. All need to be done is to train these technical operational personnel either they from the level of engineer and lower. These are the people who know everything about how everything is being operated and maintained in the plant. By having trainings on energy management such as data collection and data gathering, basic operating fundamentals and how energy being used for of each equipment and common measures to save energy for each equipment and energy using process, they would be able to play significant roles in managing the energy intensity of the plant.

11. We need to have some assistance from external experts to achieve our energy saving target but let it be one of options when is needed rather than having them to sort out everything on how how we can save energy in our own plant.


12. It is important for our own personnel to understand the methods involved in identifying energy saving potentials in our plant such as the energy management system and process itself, energy audit, data required and data collection, measurements, monitoring and etc.

13. Developing in house capacity to manage energy will give the company more options and control and results that need to be achieved especially goals that has been set will become common goals that shared by everyone in the company.