New York Industrial Partnership Network

Recognizing the potential for increased energy and cost savings, the New York Public Service Commission enacted an Energy Efficiency Portfolio Standard (EEPS) to help the state reduce electricity and natural gas consumption. In support of this goal, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) developed energy efficiency programs to help the state achieve compliance with EEPS, including the Industrial and Process Efficiency Program.

In 2009, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Advanced Manufacturing Office (AMO; formerly the Industrial Technologies Program) awarded grants to 23 state and 5 regional entities to help disseminate energy-saving resources and information to industrial manufacturers in their areas. Utilizing the DOE grant, NYSERDA partnered with consultants, universities, and manufacturing associations to benchmark industrial energy and carbon intensity in New York and establish an Industrial Partnership Network to perform industrial outreach, which identified 113 energy efficiency and productivity projects. The Network focused on upstate New York, which has the heaviest concentration of industry in the state.

Purpose

NYSERDA planned activities during the project period that were designed to help meet state and federal industrial energy intensity reduction goals—contributing 84,000 megawatt-hours in electric reduction by 2015. Efforts were mainly concentrated in the areas of benchmarking and market characterization, marketing and outreach to encourage project implementations, and identifying process consultants.

Specifically, NYSERDA pursued the following goals:

• Benchmarking the energy use of different industrial sectors in upstate New York to better determine which companies would benefit the most from energy efficiency improvement projects.
• Identifying existing energy process experts in the most energy-intensive sectors to involve in outreach.
• Creating an Industrial Partnership Network, with key organizations already interested in industrial energy efficiency, to perform focused outreach and engagement with industrial customers to encourage their participation in NYSERDA’s Industrial and Process Efficiency and FlexTech Programs. NYSERDA also offered the Network a performance-based recruitment incentive for program participation.

Accomplishments

NYSERDA created a report titled Benchmarking Electricity Consumption and Carbon Dioxide from New York State’s Industrial Focus Sector. This report classified the six most energy-intensive industrial sectors with the largest carbon footprints in the state. This report was updated in 2011 and 2012 to reflect information that had become available during the project period. In the final issuance of the report, the six most energy-intensive sectors were determined to be paper, chemicals, food, fabricated metal products, plastics and rubber products, and non-metallic mineral products.  This effort was the subject of a white paper that was presented at the 2013 American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy’s (ACEEE’s) Industrial Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Industry and is available online through ACEEE.

Based on this report, NYSERDA completed a series of fact sheets—Improving Industrial Efficiency – Target Processes and Machinery—for targeted subsectors. The fact sheets provide common energy-saving practices that can be applied to operations, as well as information on how to seek additional support. Select fact sheets are available on the NYSERDA website.

Throughout the project period, NYSERDA and the project award partners held outreach activities, including presentations to state manufacturers, stakeholders, chambers of commerce, economic development corporations, and industrial development agencies to explain the goals of the project. In addition to these outreach efforts, members of the project team also gave presentations at a Syracuse University Symposium on Environmental and Energy Systems in 2012 and at the 2011 and 2013 ACEEE Summer Studies on Energy Efficiency in Industry.

Although the funding period has ended, NYSERDA continues to work to increase energy efficiency in New York by providing capital incentives and technical assistance for projects that improve energy efficiency and productivity at industrial sites.

Program Highlights

Program Activity	Number Completed
Annual Program Meetings	3
Improving Industrial Efficiency fact sheets	5

Industrial Projects	Identified Electric Savings	Identified Gas Savings
113	165,880,000 kilowatt-hours	388,000 million Btu

One of the many projects identified was improvements to a rotary fire polisher at a press ware plant located in Corning, New York. The plant developed a rotary fire-polishing machine with newer control components and fewer moving parts, upgraded polishing burners, and implemented new tooling—resulting in close to a 30% increase in productivity due to its faster processing time and reduction in product defects. These changes allowed the machine to increase the number of good pieces per year and resulted in a yearly reduction of $192,000 in energy costs for the company.