Saving Money with Clean Energy

Saving Money with Clean Energy

Saving Money with Clean Energy. I'm Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report. Major manufacturers and companies all over the Pacific NW are discovering that they can not only save energy but money if they will embrace green technologies. Armando Nunez, Production Assistant at National Frozen Foods in Albany, OR says their peak season is right in the middle of the hottest time of the year. NUNEZ: The impact of the weather is huge as far as the energy usage we have every year and that pretty much was one of the main reasons also to try to reduce the high peak demand of electricity and of course other items like water and other wasted items. From that point on we have made improvements on different areas of the facility by implementing different measures. Nunez says that they spent some time looking at how they could make revisions to their operation and reached out to organizations for additional help. NUNEZ: We have worked with Oregon State University. We also work with Cascade Energy engineers. Knowing that the refrigeration area was one of the areas where we used over 70% of our energy is used through the refrigeration system with the cold storage, the puree line. One of the important pieces of the energy puzzle was the ability for National Frozen Foods to track energy usage. NUNEZ: We actually started doing that I'm going to say 3 years ago. We have all those baselines and graphs we get from Pacific Power every month but on top of that we implemented other measurements or ways of measuring the energy usage and same thing with water. So we have collected data for the last 4 or 5 years now which allows us to be more effective as far as attacking some of those areas that needed improvement. Just replacing old inefficient air conditioning equipment had a big impact and helped the company to remain very competitive in the marketplace. NUNEZ: Especially now in the last 2 or 3 years you see with all the economic issues going on right now we are forced to reduce the cost of each one of our items. The electrical bill is over a million dollars just here in our facility every year so we had to find ways to reduce costs in all areas and this one being one of the highest it did help a lot to help reduce the cost and of course help the bottom line. For additional information on clean energy, visit harvestcleanenergy.org. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network. www.harvestcleanenergy.org
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