Terram saves £1,000,000
February 15th 2009 Terram called on the expertise of Industrial Air Power, authorised distributor for Ingersoll Rand Industrial Technologies products throughout Wales and the South West of England, when faced with rising energy costs. The specialist manufacturer of geo-synthetic materials worked with Industrial Air Power to eliminate energy inefficiencies and re-design and install a new air compressor system.
Having already worked with Carbon Trust on a variety of projects,Terram called on their expertise along with Industrial Air Power when faced with rising energy costs. The aim was to eliminate energy inefficiencies and re-design and install a new air compressor system. The result was savings of £202,000 per annum along with:
Energy savings of approximately 11.25 million kWh over 5-years
Cost savings of approximately £1 million in 5-years
Emission savings of 7390 tonnes CO2 in the same period
Payback of about 24 months
"The savings we are seeing now are unbelievable but just as important we are reducing our carbon emissions and therefore benefiting the environment," says David Roberts, control engineer.
Although Terram had already started to investigate the costs for new compressed air systems, they hadn't looked at where, when, how much air was being used. Carbon Trust helped them identify this and used Industrial Air Power to design a system to meet their needs.
Having a tailor made system installed in turn allowed Terram to capitalise on secondary savings such as heat recovery and compressed air leak reduction. Ongoing monitoring of the fully automated system allows the savings to be quantified.
The new compressor system was located into the steam boiler house.
This enabled Terram to capitalise on an opportunity to recover the waste heat generated by the compressors and use this to raise the temperature of the water in the hot well,which feeds the boiler. Increased water temperature in turn reduces the amount of gas needed to generate steam.
The aggregated savings from the installation of the new system and implementation of the measures identified represented an 11.8% reduction in the site electrical energy consumption and overall a 38.7% reduction in the electrical energy consumption directly associated with the generation of the compressed air.
An annual CO2 saving of 1214 tonnes has been achieved plus an additional 264 tonnes from a reduction in gas usage due to the heat recovery process.
The newly installed compressors provided the opportunity to preheat the water within the boiler hot well by recovering the heat emitted from the compressors.Using the water cooling circuit and a heat exchanger they have 30 million litres per month at 90°C.
From monitoring the system, it was calculated that Terram was using on average approximately 85m3/min of compressed air with an efficiency of 8kW/m/min, which equated to 7.2 million kWh per annum. By installing a new compressor set supplied by Industrial Air Power, it was calculated that the efficiency could be improved to 6kW/m3/min. Post installation monitoring has proved that the new machinery provides an average efficiency of 5.8kW/m3/min – delivering significant savings.The gas savings are on top of this.
The benefits to Terram were fourfold: a significant reduction in energy costs, the ability to protect plant integrity, reduced maintenance cost and the added benefit of reduced gas consumption from the increased water temperature in the steam boiler hot well.
Installing new Ingersoll Rand two stage fixed speed compressors along with a Nirvana two stage trim compressor, fully automated via a control system provided Terram with primary energy savings. Secondary savings came as a result of the heat recovery process, lower maintenance costs and the leak reduction programme.
Ingersoll Rand has indentified a number of dealy sins with ragard to energy savings: System over pressurisation resulting in increased artificial demand Excessive waste through air leakage False loading of compressors due to lack of system automation and system volume Inefficiency caused by cycling fixed output compressors Excessive pressure drop. More articles from Ingersoll Rand Industrial Technologies: | 
