Energy assessments for regional manufacturers
- Client
- Manufacturers in Utah and Idaho
- My role
- Energy consultant, and later lead consultant, at the Industrial Assessment Center: on-site assessments, savings analysis and reports, and mentoring the student assessment teams.
- Timeline and attribution
- DOE Industrial Assessment Center, University of Utah (2019 to 2025)
- Scope
- Utility bill analysis | On-site industrial energy assessment | Savings and payback analysis | Written report
- 13.3%
- of plant energy cost, the average recommended savings
- 1.6 to 2.1 years
- average simple payback, assessment by assessment
- $12,795 to $75,867
- a year in recommended savings per plant
How the work ran
- 01
Bills
Twelve months of utility bills for each plant
- 02
Site visit
On-site assessment of process, HVAC, and facility systems
- 03
Measures
Each measure estimated for savings, cost, and payback
- 04
Report
A written report ranking every measure for the plant
- 05
Decision
What to install stayed the plant's own decision
The situation
- Facility and context
- Industrial plants with meaningful energy bills and nobody on staff whose job is energy: plastics molding, two feed mills, truck manufacturing, a campus chilled-water plant, a municipal wastewater plant, and a distribution facility.
- Problem or decision
- Plants wanted to know where their energy money was going and which fixes would pay back, without hiring an energy engineer.
- Baseline and data used
- Twelve months of utility bills and an on-site assessment of each plant's process, HVAC, and facility systems, through the U.S. Department of Energy's Industrial Assessment Center at the University of Utah.
Approach
- Finding
- Each assessment identified a set of measures worth 7.2% to 26.5% of the plant's annual energy cost, 13.3% on average.
- Recommended action
- A written report for each plant ranking every measure by savings, cost, and payback.
- Investment and incentive
- Average simple paybacks of 1.6 to 2.1 years, assessment by assessment. No utility incentive was assumed in the figures.
Results
- Expected or verified value
- Recommended savings of $12,795 to $75,867 a year per plant. As a share of each plant's annual energy cost, in order from 2019 to 2022: 26.5%, 7.2%, 16.0%, 9.0%, 13.1%, 13.7%, and 7.8%, for 13.3% on average. These are engineering estimates made at the time of each assessment, not verified after installation.
Recommended savings as a share of each plant's energy cost
Plastics molding
Chilled-water plant
Truck manufacturing
Feed mill
Wastewater plant
LedFeed mill
Distribution facility
LedAverage, 13.3%
Impact
- Implementation status
- Implementation was each plant's own decision, and the savings were not verified after installation.
- What happened next
- Nationally, plants implement 47% of Industrial Assessment Center recommendations by count, but only about 33% of the recommended savings by value: $854 million of $2.58 billion from 1981 to 2022. That gap between identified and realized savings is why Pathline's work continues past the report, through implementation and verification.
What usually gets implemented, nationally
- Implemented
- Rejected or unknown
No plant is named. Figures are from seven of the assessment reports I worked on, 2019 to 2022; where one report's summary and table disagree, the summary figure is used. National figures: Miera, Abbas, Nimbalkar and Wenning, Energy, 2025.
Incentive servicesOther projects and results
Working on a similar facility?
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