Energy Efficiency Case Studies
 AGILENT TECHNOLOGIES
Fort Collins
A global corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Agilent delivers
products and services to a wide range of customers in communications,
electronics, life sciences, and chemical analysis. Agilent’s 1 million
square-feet Fort Collins facility is home to 900 employees, and manufactures
semiconductor chips for optical navigation, image capture, and cell phones, and
also designs ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) chips for external
customers.
Agilent has adopted corporate policies aimed at ensuring that the company
acts in environmentally-sensitive ways in its business operations, and has
committed to reducing its baseline consumption of energy resources by 5%
annually through October 2004. The Fort Collins facility has implemented energy
efficiency, pollution reduction, and solid waste reduction programs, and when
the City of Fort Collins initiated the
ClimateWise program in April 2000, Agilent became an active partner.
The following energy-efficiency projects have been undertaken in recent
years:
- Dehumidification control. Much of Agilent’s manufacturing takes
place in clean rooms, environments that have large make-up air requirements
and which must be maintained at 40% humidity year-round. A glycol chiller, set
at a 42 degrees Fahrenheit dew point, is used to extract the moisture
necessary to meet this humidity requirement. Analysis of the local weather
patterns, however, revealed that the area’s dew point is typically below 42
degrees between November and April. Thus the clean room chiller does not need
to operate during these months. This new practice and the installation of a
new $4,000 dew point sensor have resulted in annual energy savings of $20,000.
- Chilled water supply temperature. An investigation of the
facility’s chiller plant revealed that the chiller was operating at about 4
degrees cooler than its optimum efficiency point. While initially thinking
that this additional cooling was necessary to meet manufacturing requirements,
further analysis determined that this was not the case. Thus, the chiller set
point was changed from 43 to 47 degrees. This simple no-cost change of a
routine operating procedure is now generating annual energy savings of
$18,000.
- Temperature set back. A similar no-cost evaluation of a standard
operating procedure revealed that, through software reprogramming, the HVAC
units in interior office spaces could be set back at night to a higher level
than the other spaces in the facility which require constant cooling. This
simple action reduces air pumping requirements in addition to reducing the
cooling load, resulting in $2,000 in annual energy cost savings.
- Exhaust optimization. Workbench hoods in Agilent’s clean room were
retrofitted with an energy saving feature to enable employee control of the
exhaust function. Rather than running at full speed all of the time, when
workers close the exhaust hood sash, exhaust is automatically reduced by 75%
while maintaining the required face velocities on each bench. Twenty hood
retrofits were completed at a cost of $1,000 per retrofit, resulting in a
total annual energy cost savings of $40,000.
- Air Compressor optimization. The Fort Collins site has three plant
air compressors, two of which were operating at full capacity in one building,
and a third that was underutilized in a second building. To even out the load
across the three systems and maximize their efficiency, the compressor systems
were connected across the buildings. This has not only saved the wasted
energy, but has also reduced wear and tear on the air compressors. Annual
energy savings of 250,000 kilowatt-hours and cost savings of more than $20,000
per year have been achieved.
In total, these efforts have reduced Agilent’s energy bills by about $100,000
per year, or 3 percent of the site’s electricity costs prior to the retrofits.
Agilent continues to look for ways to improve the energy efficiency of its Fort
Collins facility. In addition to the ClimateWise program, it participates in the
Platte River Power Authority’s Ka$h for
Kilowatts™ program, is ISO 14001 registered, and its pollution prevention
team won the Colorado Pollution Prevention Champion Award for 2003. |
