With backing from the U.S. Department of Energy, UWM has offered free energy assessments to nearly 100 small and medium-sized industrial companies in the last five years, making recommendations that could save them more than $7.7 million.
The Energy Department has recently renewed a grant supporting UWM’s Industrial Assessment Center for another five years. The IAC is operated by students in the College of Engineering & Applied Science who devise strategies for industries to improve their energy efficiency and reduce utility costs.
UWM’s center, the only one in Wisconsin, is one of 28 receiving Department of Energy funding through 2021.
An assessment’s recommendations could reduce a plant’s utility bills by anywhere from 5 to 30 percent, depending on which strategies are implemented, said Chris Yuan, a professor of mechanical engineering who heads the center.
If all of the 93 companies assessed in the last five years executed the students’ advice, Yuan added, the annual energy savings would have been 47 million kilowatt hours. The annual reduction of carbon emissions would have been 64,000 tons, equivalent to taking more than 12,000 cars off the road for a year.
Companies that carry out recommendations typically have return on their investment in less than two years, although it could be as short as a few months, he said.
Training students in the growing field of industrial energy-system assessment is another Industrial Assessment Center priority. Since 2012, 33 engineering students have participated and 20 of them have earned the Department of Energy’s certificates on energy assessment.
