The U.S. Department of Energy hosted the webinar, 50001 Ready Implementer Successes, in October 2019. Two utility implementers describe how 50001 Ready has benefited their programs and their customers. Michael Stowe of Advanced Energy along with Mark Stover and Tim Dantoin of Leidos and customer, Neenah Inc., share how they incorporated DOE’s 50001 Ready suite of tools into their existing SEM program offerings or related technical assistance services and the added value brought to their customers. View the recording and slides.
This webinar is part of DOE’s 50001 Ready Utility Network Series, a forum for utilities, public benefit administrators (PBA), third party implementers, consultants, and regulators who share an interest in energy management systems (EnMS) including ISO 50001 and DOE’s 50001 Ready program. Through these webinars, stakeholders can learn about DOE energy management resources and provide input.
Learn more:
- Learn more about 50001 Ready for utilities, implementers, and energy service providers
- View other 50001 Ready Utility Network Series webinars and register for future events
- Try out the 50001 Ready Navigator
Transcription
Peter Therkelsen: Good afternoon, this is Peter Therkelsen from Berkeley Lab, and welcome to the Department of Energy’s 50001 Ready Utility Network Series. I’m excited today because we have two implementers to share their uses of the 50001 Ready materials, and one of our implementers has a customer also to share their experience. Go ahead and advance one slide, please.
As I mentioned, today we’re going to have a conversation with two utility implementers – Advanced Energy and Leidos. Following the two presentations from the implementers, we’ll have a joint question and answer session. Make sure to either use the chat box function, or unmute yourself or raise your hand with the Zoom settings.
And then following that conversation, and depending on how much time we have left, based upon the questions and answers, we’ll have updates about 50001 Ready, and general Department of Energy updates, including DOE program transitions, program utilizing 50001 Ready, and 50001 Ready progress.
And with that, I’d like to turn it over to Sandy Glatt of the Department of Energy, to give her welcome to the webinar, and specifically for Advanced Energy and Leidos. Sandy?
Sandy Glatt: Yeah, thank you Peter, and welcome everyone, and I don’t want to take up too much time because we have a lot to cover as you can tell. We’re very excited to have Advanced Energy and Leidos joining us this morning, who are able to talk about specific examples of their working with customers, as well as in the case of Leidos, with being able to integrate 50001 and 50001 Ready into their program offerings. So, we hope for the audience on the phone, you find this helpful. We really encourage you to ask questions and we would like for this to be participatory in order to keep it relatively smooth.
We’d like to get through the two sets, or three sets of presentations, and then we’ll open it up for Q&A, so if you have questions from the first presentation, you know, jot them down and keep them in mind, and then we’ll go through questions all at once at the end of the two presentations. So, we’re going to start out with, I believe, Mike Stowe, and if he’s got others on his team that will be talking with Advanced Energy, followed by the Leidos team, which again I believe it’s either Mark Stover or Tim Dantoin, or John Nichol, and they will introduce themselves, as well as one of their customers, Neenah Inc., who will talk about their experiences, and again, followed by questions. So, I’m going shut up right now and turn it over to Mike, and we’ll get started.
Mike Stowe: Hello…can everyone hear me? Can anyone hear me?
Sandy: We can, Mike.
Mike: Okay. Thank you, and thank you so much to DOE and Lawrence Berkeley for the opportunity to talk about this. I tell people sometimes, I’ll pay you to let me talk about energy if you will. So I love to do it, and Advanced Energy, if you could advance the next slide – Advanced Energy, we really – quite a few years ago, actually probably five or maybe even seven years ago, we made a business decision to approach 50001 and get into that as a business goal, to work with that tool and that area in energy, and primarily at that time industrial, so we’re going talk about that a little bit, talk about one of the ways we like to approach things with the cohort method, then we’ll get into some 50001 specifics that we’ve seen, and then talk about one of the plants we work with very closely. Next slide, please.
So, we did make the business decision – our approach was to get multiple certifications in the various ISO and Superior Energy Performance world. Also, we became one of the DOE’s qualified instructors. We also serve on the committee for the scheme for the certification with the energy management professionals’ group. And we’ve done two full cohorts with DOE – we do, have developed a process that we call ISO 50001 Gap Analysis that we use, and now we’ve integrated that fully with 50001 Ready, now working with 50001 Ready implementation as the go-tool for anyone we work with for 50001. And of course, we deliver lots of training on just about anything related to this. Next, please.
So, we did co-brand with the 50001 Ready tool. We have a co-branded platform with the 50001 Ready DOE and Advanced Energy, where we can put our clients and customers. You can use the multi-site, the various functions of 50001. So, we do have a co-branded platform, and to be an active partner with DOE and Lawrence Berkeley on 50001 Ready. Next, please.
So, the cohort is one of the methods we use to demonstrate or work with companies. We’ve done several, and are – have been working with, developing one based on 50001 Ready. We’ve had several opportunities, but nothing’s come together yet, but basically, it’s five to seven companies with similar strategic energy management goals, and experience levels. Ideally non-competing – you may not want Lowe’s and Home Depot on the same cohort – but it may be ok, it just depends. But you want the cohort members to be able to share info and best practices. They get a lot of benefit from each other.
One thing we found that’s very essential and needs to be in place up front, is the management commitment. It is discouraging and frustrating to have a cohort or a company where you’ve got a person on the plant floor, an energy manager and a … somewhere that’s all enthusiastic and you get a third of the way down the road, and suddenly the plug’s pulled. So strong management commitment is essential – I would encourage anyone working with a 50001 candidate or client with Ready – they’ve got to allow time for participation, for homework – if they’re in a cohort, they need to have resources of both labor and time and materials to go to trainings, to be able to succeed in the tools. So that is – has been a point of potential frustration if you get started down the road and then you realize that the management commitment was not there. So that’s very important, and I’ll – that’s why I emphasize that so much. Next slide, please.
So, one – what we like to do with the outcomes of our cohort, is obviously gain an understanding of the ISO 50001 – the standard itself, and basically use the Navigator 50001 Ready tool as the method to do that. And the bottom line for all of us – DOE, Lawrence Berkeley, end users, implementers, utilities – is we want to increase the energy performance. We want to make more bricks, or kilowatt hours, or whatever they might happen to be making. Of course, the recognition for completing the task, and then improve overall operations. Next, please.
So, a little bit about 50001 Ready that we like and use, and some benefits – it is a – it does require you to measure your energy performance, and there is a measurement and verification protocol, so it does require a company to collect data and actually measure in some method their energy performance. Next, please.
So, one of the things that we have seen to be a very good advantage is to leverage experience with other ISO systems. It’s a heavier lift for a company that does not have any ISO experience, although that’s not a showstopper, it just requires a little more education. But leverage the experience with the clients – that if they have ISO 9000 or ISO 14000, they’re going to have some systems in place that are applicable to 50001, such as a management review, internal auditing – some of those systems are very common between all ISO, regardless of the number or the topic. So – and the 50001 Ready tool does have a section that helps to show you that if you already have 9000 or 14000, you can use that in transition. Next, please.
One of the beneficial things I believe in the ISO 50001 standard that we use a lot is the cross-reference to the relevant sections of the ISO standard. So, if you’re working on a particular task, or a topic in the 50001 Ready tool, it gives you cross-references to the standard, which can be very useful. Next, please.
One of my favorite things – and I recognize this immediately, and I’m an old plant guy working maintenance and plan engineering for many, many years – and the language of ISO, the standard itself can be somewhat intimidating and somewhat like a lawyer would write it, but the “shall do this” and “shall do that” – without a lot of specifics about what you actually need to do, and one of the great things that I really love and have implemented a lot from 50001 Ready, is on the task tab for each of the 25 tasks, there’s a Task Overview tab, which you can see the example for Energy Policy. But that section at the bottom that says “at the completion of this task, you will have done X, Y, Z” – that is most helpful, because someone that’s in a management or a maintenance job, or is an energy manager and may not be an ISO guru – this really tells them, ok, there’s a lot of stuff in the “you shall do this” about an energy policy, but this is what you really need to do, and explains it, and you really know what you need to do. And this is in every one of the 25 tasks, and is very useful. Next, please.
The other one is there’s so many downloads – there’s such a wealth of examples – of policy examples, for example – worksheets to develop an energy policy – for each of the 25 tasks, there are various downloads, and these are very useful – we found these. I’ve downloaded all these to my own laptop, so I have them at my fingertips if we go talk to a client, we can show them this. And they’re very useful, very helpful – a person implementing 50001 Ready using the tool and these tasks will not have to reinvent the wheel at all. There’s almost an example or a worksheet for just about everything, for developing your own energy policies, and your own energy documentation, or your own procedures, operational controls, worksheets, and so forth – very, very useful, so if you’re working with 50001 Ready, make good use of the downloads. Next, please.
One of the most useful downloads that I’ve found – there’s – documentation can be intimidating in some cases, you know – what, do I need to document this, do I need a procedure for that – and this table, which I just have one little excerpt from, is a downloadable in the documentation section, but it’s a documentation guidance table. And it goes through each step in the standard, and then it relates it to the task number, and then it tells you what needs to be documented, or what must be recorded. So, you go through this task, or through this useful download tool, and you look at the task numbers 1 and 19 in this case – it tells you, you need a document for this, or you may need a record for that. One key thing to remember that sometimes confuses people – what’s the difference between a document and a record? If you think about a form, a blank form that you have written up to be used in your energy management system is a document. As soon as you fill that form out, with some data from your plant, you need to keep it – it becomes a record. So, forms and records – documents and records. Next, please.
So just to paraphrase in this kind of – simplest terms, but the 50001 Ready tool really puts the Plan Do Check … methodology into simple, clear steps in the 25 tasks. And basically, if you bullet down, say what you’re going to do – that’s your plan. Do what you said you would – that’s the do. Check and verify that you did it – that’s the check, and then make it better – review it and improve it. So really, you just have to say what you’re going to do, do what you said, check that you did it, and if you didn’t do it, make it better. Next, please.
So, one plant’s story – one plant we talked to, they were already 9000 and 14000 certified. They actually had a gold – LEED Gold in a manufacturing plant, which is very unusual. And they had a desire to achieve ISO 50001 certification. When we first started working with this plant, 50001 Ready had not rolled out yet. So we started with a gap analysis. Next, please.
So, basically, we did an analysis of where they were versus where they needed to be, and the difference is the gap. Next, please.
So, the gap analysis – I’m sorry, go back one – yeah, the gap analysis process, we looked at their operations, energy sources, their documentation, and basically made a gap spreadsheet. Next slide. So we went through each step of the – again, we didn’t have 50001 Ready at this point, so the section of the ISO standard – planning, doing, checking, acting – would be on the left-hand side. Where they were now – what the ISO requirement was, what the gap was, what they needed to do, and we came up with a gap analysis. Next, please.
And also, based on that gap analysis, we made a work schedule, in order to complete this. Next. So then, we were in the middle of this, and actually to be honest, things had kind of bogged down and slowed down a little bit – again, the people doing this wear about seven hats in the plant, and they were just busy and things had bogged down. And then the 50001 Ready rolled out that summer, and we were very excited about it – I knew it was coming, and the first thing I did was to schedule a site visit to go back and implement 50001 Ready. It’s based on the ISO 50001 standard, and we went back to the plant. Next slide, please.
And basically went through all 25 tasks on the dashboard, and marked them accordingly, put their – got them lined up, filled in all the blanks, got their names of the people who needed to be doing what, went through the tasks, marked them complete, or ready to review, or just started, or not started, which you can pick various tasks. Got their dashboard up to date for where they were at that point. And they loved it – they absolutely loved it. They just didn’t really – they were kind of waving in the breeze, and this kind of really got them focused, and they could really see, ok, I got these 12 done, I’ve got this one in progress, I’ve got these 12 to do, and they proceeded and used 50001. Next slide, please.
Before the summary, I’ll just say one thing – unfortunately, they – the plant we worked with in this story, they went straight to certification and they never applied for the recognition, so that’s unfortunate from the 50001 Ready point of view. But they did go straight and got certification, and they were very, very happy with the use of 50001 Ready – they probably wouldn’t have got across the finish line without it.
So just in summary, it’s very much worth the effort – it is an alternative to certification, if you don’t need certification, or are not required by your corporate headquarters to get certification. Help for the weary – the guys that are typically the energy managers in each plant, or maintenance managers, or project engineers, or have 27 other things to do – so it really is useful, and it really gives you some leverage to get this done. And the 25 tasks really help you have guidance with the dashboard, to be able to assign things and do it. It has great tools for energy data – you can go task by task, you can do your dashboard tracking – there’s great resources. And you self-attest. And the bottom line is, it’s all free – it’s all free. It’s provided by the government, it’s free to anybody that wants to download it and use it. Next, please.
So, what we try to do is put the end user, which is the brick manufacturer, or whoever you might be, right in the middle of 50001, and if you’ll just click though these Amy one at a time – you’ve got your utilities, electrical and natural gas for the big utilities – you want to … you want to consult them, you want to work with the DOE programs, you want to have a consultant like Advanced Energy or Leidos, or anybody – there’s lots of us out there. You got the – DOE has the Georgia Tech training partnership and cohorts and lots of DOE resources, and then you’ve got – if you want to go to certification, you got your third-party certifiers for ISO. These aren’t the only ones – there’s just a couple ones and others. So you want to put our end user or industrial site right in the middle of all these resources. You got your account managers for your electrical utilities and gas, you’ve got DOE support, you’ve got consultants out there. And an end user that’s interested in strategic energy management, particularly ISO 50001 and 50001 Ready tool implementation, put him right in the middle and there’s lots of resources and you can lead him down the path with lots of help and support. Next slide, please.
So, survey says – four out of five energy consultants surveyed recommend 50001 Ready. Please note the asterisk besides surveyed – there was no actual survey done, this is just to make a point. So, use 50001 Ready to prevent this from happening to your energy team. And I think I’m done. Next slide, please. Yeah – thank you very much, that’s my two cents worth, and if you have any questions later on, I’ll be happy to talk to you. Thank you.
Sandy: Okay, thank you Mike, that was excellent. I think it’s no surprise to anyone who just listened to the presentation that Mike – Mike knows what he’s talking about when it comes to ISO, and energy management, and he currently has been our – sort of our Rockstar instructor, delivering some of the curriculum materials that we’ve been developing, both to end users as well as to utility personnel in the 50001, 50001 Ready space. So he’s a tremendous resource, and I hope you have some good questions for him. And without further ado, I will turn it over to the Leidos team – I believe Mark is starting, if not, you can correct me, and you can introduce one another as well as your presenter from Neenah when we get there. So, over to the Leidos team.
Mark Stover: Thanks, Sandy, this is Mark Stover, and good morning, good afternoon everybody. Glad you could join us today. I want to say that Tim is also on the line. I’ll start things off here a little bit, and invite Tim to add in as he has perspectives and things to offer as we go along through the slides. John Nichol won’t be joining us here today, but John is the program director for the large energy users’ program here in Wisconsin.
We wanted to give you a little bit of background on what it is that we’re doing to help set up John Waterman’s experience with the Focus on Energy program in Wisconsin. And so, knowing a little bit about that will help you to understand better. So, Focus on Energy is that statewide energy and efficiency program in Wisconsin. It’s been around since 2001 – it serves both residential and business customers. It’s a little unusual around the country, in that we’re not dealing with just one utility, we’re dealing with five investor-owned utilities, and more than 100 municipal and co-op utilities around the state. So, the nice thing about this particular program, this Focus on Energy program, is that the resources that are made available to one customer can be made available to everybody – everybody who is participating – everybody who working with a participating utility that is – has access to all the services of Focus on Energy, which includes things like financial, technical, and educational resources, all designed to help customers improve their energy efficiency. So, with the next slide, please.
In particular, Tim and I work for the portion of the Focus on Energy program that focuses on the largest energy users in the state, so big companies that do paper, for instance – which we’ll be hearing from John in just a little bit. Or metal casters, or plastic companies, food processors – they’re all large energy users in the state. And all of those large energy users in Wisconsin have an energy advisor, who works with Focus on Energy and is assigned specifically to provide assistance and support, both technical and project support, to those customers. So, energy advisors are kind of the nexus for how service is delivered to these companies – the EA’s obviously work closely with their customers, and help to coordinate with the utility reps, or with trade allies that are actually delivering the VFD installation or new boiler install.
The EA’s provide technical support in terms of both identifying opportunities that maybe the energy engineer hasn’t recognized, or didn’t realize would be something they could get some support for. And then quantifying those opportunities, not only in terms of the ROI for the customer, but also in terms of the energy savings that we think we’re going to be getting out of that project.
EA’s also do a lot of work with helping customers to sort of navigate the incentive application process that Focus on Energy provides so that customers can get their incentives, but the whole thing, just like Mike talked about – is towards improving energy management. We want to make sure that customers are not only able to make their energy use better, but that they’re actually able to manage their energy better, because these large energy users have a significant amount of energy investment. So, in the next slide, we talk a little bit about the strategic energy management initiative here in Wisconsin. And our presentation is basically around how we integrated ISO 50001, or rather 50001 Ready, and ISO 50001 for that matter – but how we integrated the 50001 Ready program into our SEM initiative as well. So, it goes back to 2015 or even 2014, when we had customers that were asking about, you know, what more could they do in order to improve their energy management.
We got good support, maybe great support even, from the program administrator here in Wisconsin, because what they allowed us to do was create a budget to actually provide milestone and step-by-step incentives for customers that enrolled in that program. So, in 2015, Tim was responsible for launching what we called the SEM Leaders Program, so it had its own budget, it had its own energy goals, and it was evaluated by the program evaluator too.
It concluded in 2018, so it started in 2015 as a cohort with 30 participants. Three dropped out during the program, but 27 reached the end goal, which varied for each one of them. But 27 had success in terms of either becoming 50001 certified – five of them managed to make it that far. An additional eight achieved or are currently pursuing the 50001 Ready recognition from the DOE. And we have – I’ll follow up this cohort initiative that Tim led with an individual enrollment process I guess you call it. It’s not a program, but an offering that continues the strategic energy management and our links with 50001. I should say that part of the incentive process, or the incentive structure that was built into that cohort that Tim led from 2015 to 2018 included incentives for achieving these goals too – achieving 50001 certification, or 50001 Ready. And I think that’s probably one of the lessons learned that we came out of this with, is it does help to have those incentives to help sell it to management. Next slide, please.
So, this slide is just a colorful rendition of all of the different logos for the various companies that participated in that cohort program. We called some leaders – you’ll see Neenah’s there in the middle. And it’s actually a pretty good cross-section of the variety of different types of industries in Wisconsin – there’s paper, there’s plastic, food processing, there’s metal casters here in the list, printers, and large OEM’s, large manufacturing companies that have their own supply chain. So, a wide variety of customers, and I think the takeaway here is that the 50001 Ready process, strategic energy management, really can apply in a variety of different industries. It’s not something that’s just limited to one industry or another. Could you go to the next slide?
Here’s where we get into some of the more – get into more of the detail I guess, of our SEM implementation process. So, the successor program to SEM Leaders is this program we called SEM Partners, and I’ll explain a little bit of how that integrates as we get through this slide. But basically, what we’ve done here in Wisconsin is to – we have an internal capability here to develop regression models for the customers that we work with. There is the EnPI tool that is built into the Navigator, and some customers have found that to be beneficial or valuable. We’ve also provided them though with their own regression model, which we then update with them on a monthly basis. So, the process that we typically follow is customers interested in doing something with us with regard to strategic energy management – we get data from them, for their model – production data for their model. We integrate with the utility to get the energy data, and then we provide them with the model, we get them to actually review that and verify that it’s a useful model for them. And then we establish a monthly cadence for meeting with them to identify, based on the models, comparison of expected usage to the actual usage, what kinds of things might be going on in the plant that would lead to additional opportunities for improvement.
In that process of working with us on a monthly basis, there’s a couple of milestones that we want them to try to achieve in the first 12 months. One of them is to actually do a gap analysis. I was interested to see that Mike’s program is running in many ways sort of parallel to the kinds of things we’re doing – management commitment is important, having ISO experience can also be important. We do the gap analysis up front to help them to – help our customers to understand just what are they going to need to do in our group to create within their program, within their management system, a world-class kind of approach. And we do that with the ISO, or with the 50001 Ready structure, to help them to see that as a stepstone to 50001 certification, if they’re interested in it.
So the energy review also helps them to understand where their significant energy users are, and it’s interesting – even though we work with some fairly sophisticated companies, sometimes that’s quite revealing for them, to understand really where the significant energy users are, and even more revealing to manage them, because for most companies, energy is an invisible resource – it’s hard to tell what it is that you’re using. And management in particular has a step or two removal from that process, so helping them to understand where the significant energy users are is a good way to get management to buy into this program as well.
A key part of what we do in those monthly meetings then is to discuss the opportunities, whether they be capital improvement opportunities, or operational and maintenance type of improvement activities. We keep a list – we keep a running list and we maintain that focus on what’s the energy improvement likely to be, what kind of energy savings are we likely to get, and what kind of ROI is the customer receiving.
One of the things that Tim did that we did hear of with Leidos, is we partnered with a third-party company called EPS – Energy Performance Services from Canada. They provided significant support to our customers with regard to their energy IT capabilities. So if a customer didn’t have a lot in terms of energy IT, EPS could come in and help significantly to improve their data acquisition and their data sharing capabilities, which then further made it interesting for me, and of course, whenever you get involved in these things with management, one of the first thing they’re going to want to do is see what kind of data kit do you have, and is it showing success, are we showing progress?
So, energy IT capabilities is a big outcome, I think, of – one of the big outcomes of the process that we get to go through. Obviously, we evaluate the energy savings, and at the end of the year we’re going to provide a review with management, to show them how much progress has been made by their energy team. And at that point, the customer has an opportunity to sort of take a couple of different paths. They do have the opportunity to say, thanks, this has been a great year, we’re not really interested in continuing our SEM journey anymore. And I can tell you that very few of them do that. In fact, I really can’t think of any that have done that with us, unless it was, you know, some reason when there was a change in ownership of the business.
They find this strategic energy management and integration with 50001 Ready to be very helpful. They can remain a SEM partner with us, and continue going through this monthly cadence of reviewing the performance tracker, reviewing their model, and continuing to improve their capabilities. Or, if you click one there, Amy, I think it’ll highlight that corner there – they can become what we call SEM Leader, which is helping them to – we provide them with systems to pursue the 50001 certification, or to pursue the 50001 Ready recognition. They can also get interested in it – certification from outside third parties on their SEM efforts. And many of our customers, as we’ve talked about at the beginning, actually do pursue that opportunity, to become 50001 Ready.
So, if we go to the next slide, we talk a little bit here about how we’ve utilized 50001Ready in our SEM program. It’s actually a really good way to gauge a customer’s understanding and readiness. When we do that gap analysis early on with the customers, because we do that as well, it helps them to see just how far they have to go, or just what areas they need to focus on, for further improving their strategic energy management system, or even pursuing the ISO certification.
For some, the 50001 Ready does become the endpoint. If we could go back one slide, please? Thanks. The endpoint goal for some customers is to achieve the 50001 Ready recognition, and some also use it as a stepping stone for their ISO certification. As Mike pointed out, there are a number of – I think there’s over 120 resources that are built into the 50001 Ready Navigator structure – that provide great resources for our customers; even if they end up not wanting to pursue the recognition, many of them have taken a look at those resources and see that as a real valuable tool for their understanding of the kinds of things that they would need to do in order to approve their approach to energy management.
Many of the customers also see value in earning customer recognition for the achievements, and John can talk a little bit more about that in just a couple of minutes. This is obviously also a good jumping off point for pursuing the ISO certification. So, let’s talk – one more slide here, Amy. We’ll talk a little bit about benefits and challenges, and what we see as kind of a going-forward platform for our efforts here in Wisconsin anyway.
Clearly the benefits of working on the 50001 Ready process are that there’s a defined structure that really provides support, and some of my customers have said that’s what has sustained it for their management team, is that there’s a structure here that they can see and follow – that the task list will help them to move through the process in a smooth and structured kind of way that they can check. It is also a specific endpoint – for many of our SEM customers, they want to achieve that 50001 Ready recognition because it’s meaningful. It’s very useful to see that in a public setting.
A couple of the challenges – obviously integrating with the existing continuous improvement system is both a challenge and an opportunity. We’ve also seen customers who will tell us that sustaining the ability to get management’s continued buy-in and continued support in terms of resources for the program, and for the program … is sometimes difficult, but knowing that you’re working towards some kind of public recognition is a really good way to keep management involved.
So, we’ve used – so going forward, we’d like to see 50001 – one slide back, once back. One thing that we have seen is that 50001 Ready offers a really good opportunity to customers to audit their capabilities internally to a world-class standard. We have started to look at using 50001 – the 50001 Partner Platform, actually – as a way to pursue an enterprise approach. We’ve got a couple of customers that were on that list that have multiple facilities around the state of Wisconsin, and helping them to manage those facilities to that partner platform is something that we’re just starting to take a look at.
And finally, one of the things that I’ve been interested in, especially because of my background in quality, and continuous improvement in that area, is looking at supply chain. I think one of the ways that we’re going to drive the integration or the adoption of 50001 and 50001 Ready is if customers ask their – ask their suppliers to get involved in this.
So now let’s move to that next slide, and I’ll kick it over to John and his team – John’s the CEO, representing his team here today, at Neenah Incorporated – they are at the Whiting Plant in Wisconsin, and I’ll just let John take it over from there.
John Waterman: All right, thank you Mark. Hope everyone can hear me all right. So, my name’s John Waterman, I am a process engineer for Neenah Inc. We are a global manufacturer of paper products, and moving onto the next slide – we can see we achieved the ISO 50001 Ready recognition through the Department of Energy, and we can highlight a couple milestones here with Neenah Inc.’s involvement.
So, we have several niche markets, whether it’s technical products, or fine paper and packaging. Neenah Inc. in total employs just over 2500 employees. We have 14 sites in the United States, and several others overseas in Europe. Overall, global sales of $1 billion in 88 plus countries, and this is a publicly traded company on the stock market. And headquartered in A… Georgia.
Onto the Whiting Mill in specific – same slide, so 245 employees, and 24/7 operation. Just about 365 days a year, and there are four paper machines, in total about 345 tons of good paper per day. So, this is a significant energy user it itself, and we were able to break that down into more specific pieces of equipment along the way.
There are two natural gas boilers that generate steam for the mill, and we also have a converting department on site, with several finishing assets, before those products go to the end user. Now, moving onto some of the product portfolio of the company – towards the top, you’ll see more fine paper and packaging, with box wrap, wine labels is a big business – wide format, you may see at public stores. And moving towards the bottom, getting more into technical products, whether it’s paper card and carriers, or even filtration products that need to hold up and sustain their strength and filtration properties over time, whether it’s in a vehicle or paper card carrier in your wallet, to replace a plastic gift card.
And with the commitments and benefits of Neenah Paper, you can see that through the years we have been involved with several upgrades to existing equipment, and these are all getting the capital upgrades that were facilitated with incentive programs through Focus on Energy. Overall, it’s important to facilitate these energy-related projects – they are going to be almost essential, as Michael Stowe mentioned, to have strong management involvement with the program. As long as you have an energy team that meets regularly, you still need to have buy-in from the entire corporation to support these initiatives.
Our energy team is composed of every department in the mill, whether it’s operations on my end, or getting in touch with finance, engineering, and even quality technical, to take ideas that come from either the crew or a vendor, and just determine if that’s even a feasible idea to pursue. And eventually, will turn into a full-on project with funding through the corporation, as well as planned incentives through Focus on Energy.
So, just going through the years, I tried to highlight some specific examples or unique examples for each year, but you’ll see the annual totals for each year as you go down the line, so whether it’s a boiler blowdown upgrade, there’s going to be several freshwater reduction opportunities throughout the mill, and that’s almost a ongoing yearly initiative with recirculation of existing whitewater, or elimination of freshwater lines all together.
And towards the bottom, you can see through the SEM Leaders initiative, so strategic energy management leaders, we as Neenah Inc. were granted $113,000 in 2018, and that was for achievements earned along the way of strategic energy management program, and also for implementing the ISO 50001 Ready program all together.
Looking at all of these projects, it helps give a scale of the footprint of just the Whiting facility specifically. And through all of these projects, help from Focus on Energy in implementing these capital upgrades, since 2014 there’s been over 6.6 million kilowatt-hours per year reduction in electricity. Moving onto gas, 1.3 million therms per year reduction. And overall, an energy cost – or annual energy cost decreased by $1.25 million, just through these energy-related projects.
Now, onto the ISO 50001 Ready program in general. This would be a great achievement, and with that, it required great support from several third parties, and even the corporation itself. So, we made sure to utilize – outside resources were needed, and that’s when this whole thing with our energy advisor came in handy very frequently. Overall end goal for us – June 8th, 2018, the Neenah Inc. Whiting Mill recognized for achieving global best practices in continuous energy improvement.
The Whiting facility was the first paper mill in Wisconsin to achieve 50001 Ready status, and this just highlights the commitment to sustainability throughout the entire corporation. Now, 50001 Ready and joined the ranks with the other renewable certifications that we have achieved. So there’s a point in there on maintaining the program infrastructure, and this is a huge point that was described in a bit more detail earlier in the presentation, how it goes through 25 tasks, through the Ready Navigator tool, and this really tied into a lot of existing documentation that we already had at our facility. It was just a matter of putting in some final touches, and tuning it to the requirements and other ideas that are going to have to need to be included to ensure that this is a sustainable initiative, and can be passed down through other energy team members, so that it’s a sustainable program.
Overall, for example, there’s an energy performance indicator – so, we did establish a baseline in energy consumption per, say, 1000 pounds of paper, and this was set up by Leidos, which in turn covered almost all of the requirements for the indicator model with the Department of Energy, and so that highlights how you can have something that’s already tracking energy performance, or has been a document that is regularly updated through mill personnel, and it already covers a majority of the tasks in the Ready Navigator tool to help sign off on ISO 50001 Ready.
Another good example would be, say, for the energy policy, and getting management involved – so, we often have – so when we do have an energy team meeting, we’re going to review ideas that come from the floor, whether it’s from the crews that work personally with the machines on a day-to-day basis, and know the little things that may not come to light on an initial walk-through, and even up to the mill manager, who is able to sign off on certain ideas.
Everyone’s going to be involved – there’s going to be a – there should be a consensus around getting together specifically to talk about energy-related ideas, and how do we move these things forward, as you saw in the project list on the prior slide. Overall, it’s the certification process – it will take an allotment of resources, whether it’s from other engineers, and you can just start hacking away at the task lists one-by-one, otherwise, there’s going to be several audits that could help shine light on the gaps that are in your mill itself, and that just helps identify even greater opportunities for future upgrades.
The process in itself is going to help your facility no matter what as you start looking into the process bit by bit, and identify the significant energy users – that even a small upgrade can be very significant down the line, once you have a newer model, or newer type of equipment installed. And that concludes my slides in general. I am happy to answer questions about the program in general – how we were able to implement this with our facility, and how we plan to transition with this ongoing process for other facilities.
Sandy: Thank you John, and thank you very much Mark as well. And we’re going to start our Q&A session here. You guys can unmute yourself, I guess as Peter says by clicking over your name, or you can use the Chat screen at the bottom of your screen to type in a question, and we’ll monitor that and Peter will ask those that come up there, before we get started on our final few slides. So, please folks take the time and opportunity to ask these gentlemen some questions. Those were excellent presentations with a lot of terrific information. Any questions?
Peter: Sandy, Rayleen just shot one over that is a good, great question for both – well actually all our presenters, but specifically for Neenah – is that, did you have any ISO experience, and then maybe more broadly to both Mike and Mark – Mike spoke a little bit about ISO experience being beneficial – I’m wondering if Mark has seen that as well, but first to Neenah, if you had any other ISO or other management system experience beforehand?
John: Yeah, I do know that the Whiting facility had achieved ISO 9001 status, and we were certified in that, however that was before my time, so about 2014, where I don’t believe the facility renewed their certification, however, we did have management involved in that initiative. That was still around and active in the energy team to kind of help give us an idea of format and how to move forward with the third parties, whether it’s Focus on Energy, or Department of Energy. So, yes, we did have prior involvement. However, me personally, setting up the DOE task list and going through the requirements – I had no prior experience, and so I don’t believe it’s essential if you’re going to go for 50001 Ready.
Mike: And this is Mike, I’ll chime in a little bit. We also – well, actually, honestly, I have not worked with a customer that had zero energy or system experience. The customers we work for typically have 9001 if they’re a manufacturer, and several, quite a few had 14001 and some had the safety, which is now 45001 I think. But anyway, the one company in my story, in my presentation – they had 14000, and at that time OSHA’s 18001, which is now 45001 for safety. So, they had three ISO systems in place, and what we did in that case – they had lots of experience, but still there is still quite a few I’s to dot and T’s to cross to get the 50001 integrated. And they had an environmental health and safety manual, and we helped them make that into the environmental energy health and safety manual. And basically, added the sections we needed to add, which were not there at all, and tweaked the sections that were there but needed to mention energy aspects of the 50001 standard.
And one thing I will say, is that I think with the 50001 Ready tool, we have seen that if you do not have any ISO experience, that’s definitely not a showstopper, and the 50001 Ready tool makes it much easier, I believe, than just trying to read the standard and do it. So a company without any ISO experience I think could do this – maybe take a little more time, there’s a little more lifting and work to do, but with the task and the ISO – or the 50001 Ready tool, those tasks help you see what you need to do, even if you’ve never done it before. So, you may have to make a management review system, you have a make an internal auditing system, or a corrective action system, but the tool will help you do that. You don’t have to have one existing for safety, or something else. So, again, it helps, but it’s not a requirement to have that ISO, or previous ISO experience.
Peter: Mark, would you like to add onto that?
Mark: I was just thinking, John and Mike did a great job answering the question. No, I don’t think I have anything better to add.
Tim: This is Tim, I can add very quickly to that. When we invited customers to participate in our SEM Leaders program, we looked very specifically for continuous improvement experience. It’s a double-edged sword, because they understand continuous improvement, and here comes this 50001 thing, wanting to mess with their existing successful programs. So, there’s a little bit of integration issues going on there. And I will add, several of the participants did not have extensive or really any continuous improvement experience, and we used the energy-related efforts to perhaps improve the company’s efforts in quality and environment, in terms of reporting and record-keeping. Kind of pulled those along with our energy efforts.
Sandy: I see some additional questions coming in, Peter.
Peter: Yeah. Yeah, no, the questions are coming fast and furious – this is great. A question for John – was there any reluctance from staff in taking on this initiative at the outset, and how or did that attitude change at the completion of the process when benefits were realized? How does everyone feel now as you continue this process?
John: Sure. So I think early we were in the process, which is – that’s when we had more reluctance in pursuing this program. It is so intimidating, all of the requirements that you need for ISO 50001 Ready. However, as we started to compile our documents, look at what do we have existing, and what may be required by a third party, where we started to realize we are a lot closer than we thought. As soon as we walked through the SEM Leaders initiative, which Tim Dantoin helped promote, and saw the benefits step-by-step, whether it is implementing energy IT, or achieving certain ranks of the ISO 50001 Ready program, or different milestones, then you start to realize the full benefits that sure, it will require some resources on our end, but the end goal – first of all, the program’s going to pay for itself, and other types of metering devices – for example, that’s what we used our grants in 2018 for, was for more steam-tracking devices. And even promote energy efficiency throughout the mill on the way. And now that we are continuing the process, we still update our performance models, have energy team meetings, and continue the same spreadsheets as far as the project pipeline goes, to track where we are and what we want to pursue once we have more capital funding.
So, it has helped establish kind of a baseline for looking at our projects, and moving forward from there. I do see another question from Paul, asking, do you foresee ISO certification? What are the pros and cons to pursuing this certification? And with Neenah Inc., we – our end goal was ISO 50001 Ready, which is one step away from ISO 50001 certification. And perhaps Tim Dantoin can speak to this more, but from what I understand, and why we did not pursue the certification, is the amount of resources – or I guess, yeah, the amount of resources required for the certification do not outweigh the grant potential that we would receive for this achievement. So basically, it would take a lot more organization on our end, and getting an extra engineer involved, however, it would not be perhaps the next level that we’re looking from Ready status to certification.
Peter: And Tim and Mark, can you speak specifically to why your customers in Wisconsin do or do not pursue certification, and then going back to Mike, can you speak maybe a little bit more about why your customer, who was stuck on pursuing full certification, and then went to Ready, and that process, got re-engaged, and then ended up kind of leapfrogging over Ready recognition onto certification, and why – what changed so much? But let’s start with Leidos in Wisconsin.
Mark: Well, I just – I’ll let Tim talk about some of his customers who have actually achieved the ISO 50001 certification, but I can tell you from my experience, there are a few customers that are not interested in having that outside third party taking a look at things. They would prefer to keep that – the audit process and the focus on internal operations as a business, internal to the business. And so, 50001 Ready fits that bill perfectly, since it’s a self-attestation. Tim’s worked with a number of companies that have made it to the certification standpoint, so maybe you’ve got some comments?
Tim: My basic answer is they have – (garbled) – personnel changes, and everything else going on, so it’s a great external gauge on keeping the thing in place. On the opposite side, we also have companies that are really good at ISO 9000 and 14000, and they’ve essentially grafted energy into their environmental program, and really don’t see the need for one more certification, for – to validate their efforts. And the 50001 Ready provides that validation, that they’re doing things right, and they can hold it up and show their internal – (garbled) – that they’re doing it right, and they can also brag to the outside world, that hey, we’re everything but the certification, so.
Peter: And Mike, maybe just 30 seconds if you could just speak to that. I know you already did in your presentation. We want to try to squeeze in one last question before our time expires, though.
Mike: Sure, yeah – I agree with Tim, there’s definitely different motivations, and some – I mean, some people get a corporate directive – you shall become certified. Other companies are working on their own, and just make that decision. In the case of my story and my presentation, actually their motivation for all of this was to get more LEED points, by doing ISO and maybe even SEP one day. They were looking toward getting to LEED Platinum, which was an interesting motivation. But they were always going to get certified in ISO 50001 from the first time we started helping them.
50001 Ready came out, we implemented it – they loved it, it really got them going. You know, I don’t think they would be certified yet if it hadn’t come out, and they hadn’t applied it. But their goal all the time was certification – they just kind of went through the 50001 Ready as the tool to get them there, and they went straight to certification with a third party because that’s what they wanted, and again, they love 50001 Ready, they just didn’t take the time or didn’t need to get the recognition, so. And again, there’s different motivations for different companies. We’ve seen – I have seen a lot of people that say, you know, we’re doing 14001 and has energy aspects, you know, we don’t need to do 50 – which I disagree with, but I can see their point. But 50’s much more rigorous and gets you much more down the road, so, thanks.
Peter: All right, thank you. And let’s try to squeeze in – we’re right in the top of the hour and I acknowledge that – that is our slotted time, so if you need to drop off, please – we’re just going to take one last quick question, and we will be posting these materials online to the Better Buildings Solution Center. We’ll send out that link and the slides after the presentation as well. And very quickly, did either facility have to invest in additional sub-metering to gather needed energy data, or was the emphasis more on facility energy usage? And I’ll quickly start that by saying, 50001 itself has a focus on what both presentations talked about – significant energy usage, and in some cases, sub-metering is a necessity for ISO 50001 certification. But Ready really tries to use some of the barriers, especially financial barriers to engaging energy management, and sub-metering is not a requirement of Ready. So while sometimes it gets people excited, and they’re able to get management to provide additional financial resources for sub-metering, it’s not a requirement of Ready itself.
I’ll let the other presenters chime in to see if there was any change of heart in terms of resources, or if those companies felt that sub-metering was a benefit in their specific cases.
John: Yeah, I can share some thoughts on the energy meters that we required. So, first of all, the third parties that we were involved with – so, Focus on Energy, they did come in several times with portable power meters, and gave any baseline data on equipment that, say, we knew had potential, but still needed the baseline data to justify any upgrades. Also, with some of the newer improvements, such as variable speed capabilities on pumps or motors, you can – they have power meters built in, and now that just gives us more of a baseline and energy tracking models from there for each of those upgrades. As far as purchasing further metering – so, beyond what the program requires, I did mention through the grants that we received through the SEM Leaders initiative, we use a majority of those funds for our own metering devices for personal growth, or I guess to grow a facility and track steam usage at different points in the process. And even that itself gives you a gap analysis to work on further upgrades, whether it’s through the piping or through the boilers that are feeding the steam.
Tim: This is Tim. I can quickly add, across all the participants in our program – they ran the spectrum of energy IT capabilities. And in – we essentially took them where they were and viewed that capability as part of the continuous improvement process. In several instances, we used the lack of metering as a way for senior management to exhibit their resource support under ISO to go out and get meters. And you help the company identify where they’re lacking information, and then make the case for doing the purchase to get the metering, so you have the data, so you can measure your performance. So, it really is just part of the overall continuous improvement process.
Mike: Yeah, can I add?
Mark: Go ahead, Mike.
Mike: Yeah, I’m sorry…yeah, that – Tim is exactly right, we see all, you know, it’s all over the place, but just two examples – one in the story in my presentation – they had lots of energy stuff that they had done, for LEED and other things, but they had lots of metering in place, and when we were doing the pie chart to figure out their significant energy uses, they had excellent data that they had been collecting for years. They had two major paint lines, and that was it. And they had data on gas and electrical for both those paint lines. In another case, we actually – they metered their electrical, and actually metered their compressor standard cubic feet per minute delivery, directly to their different lines in the plant, and they actually had their line managers paying the utility bill as a direct cost. So, if you were on the line X, and you were metered this much kWh, then that came out of your budget. So just like overtime, and other things, utilities and energy became a direct line item for a line in the plant. And that was kind of unique – they metered everything down to the sub-panels at the line level, so, thanks.
Sandy: Ok, well I want to thank everyone, particularly for staying on a few extra minutes – we are going to not be able to get through the DOE update slides, but they will be included in the slide deck when we post it online, as well as the recording. And you can contact any of us to get some of the additional information, but the one important slide that I did want to cover, and you all know how to reach us, is if you – how to access the slide deck, but this the last time I will be the leader for the network series, as I am going to be retiring at the end of November, so I’m introducing you to Ethan Rodgers. Ethan is going to be the new person who is taking over, at least for now, the delivery of the network series, so get familiar with that name, and if you want to add members of your team onto our list, he’s the right person. And introducing him there in person and along with his wonderful dog, but thank everyone, and thank you for staying with us, and we really appreciate our speakers, and we will talk to you – not me, but others will talk to you in about three months. So take care.
Peter: Thank you all. Thank you, Sandy. Bye now.