Investigation of energy saving potentials of a food factory by energy audit

Abstract

There is no doubt that energy efficiency is the best solution for the challenges of modern society such as global warming, environmental impact assessment, industrial ecology, improved energy management and new energy sources. Within this scope, energy efficiency policy has been developed by the many countries to minimize the energy consumption of unit products and to recover the industrial waste heat. This paper presents a case study for determining whole energy saving potentials arising from the main selected equipments in a biscuit factory. For this purpose, several instruments were used to measure heat losses, surface temperatures, properties of stack gas, flow rate of stack gas and luminous intensity, etc. From the analysis results, it reveals that total energy saving amount based on natural gas and electricity is 50.96 TOE/year after various remedies, which corresponds to 8% total energy consumption of the investigated equipment in the factory. Thus, energy efficiency applications result in a profit of about 24766 $/year and a reduction of 89.91 tons CO2 emission per year. This study has shown that with the simple applications in food factories, efficient use of energy can be increased and therefore energy intensity can be improved. We hope that this study will be a reference for energy managers in food factories to provide more energy savings.