Following the 2020 Association of Energy Engineers (AEE) International Awards ceremony on October 14, MechChem Africa talks to Alfred Hartzenburg, national project manager of South Africa’s National Industrial Energy Efficiency (IEE) Project, about why it was a worthy winner and the project’s ongoing importance for South Africa.
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At the 2020 Association of Energy Engineers (AEE) International Awards ceremony held via a global virtual ceremony on October 14, The International Energy Project of the Year award, the highest international accolade for an energy programme, was won by the South African National Industrial Energy Efficiency Project (IEE Project).
South Africa’s IEE Project, which has been led since 2010 by the National Cleaner Production Centre South Africa (NCPC-SA) and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), received the award in recognition of its successful efforts to transform energy use patterns in South African industry, by mainstreaming energy management systems and pioneering energy training and professional development across economic sectors.
Since its first implementation projects in 2011, the IEE Project team has assisted industrial companies to save 6.5 TWh of energy, translating to cumulative cost savings of R5.3-billion in these companies. “This is approximately equivalent to five years of Eskom load shedding at the recently-experienced highest rates (1.325 TWh/year in 2019),” Hartzenburg points out.
“At the end of the day, energy efficiency is about doing basic things better, which is not always that exciting. But our relentless pursuit of project outputs in the energy space has laid the groundwork for a multitude of achievements. We are so proud that, after more than 10 years of hard work and against the best initiatives the world has to offer, our IEE Project has been acknowledged as exceptional,” he says.
The NCPC-SA was first conceived in 2002 at the worldwide sustainable summit in Johannesburg and founded with financial aid from the Austrian and Swiss Governments. “Our mission was to reduce waste streams in three areas, water, energy and materials. We have since added industrial symbiosis and reuse, but essentially our core purpose is unchanged,” he tells MechChem Africa.
He says that the rolling blackouts of 2007/2008 were a wake a up call for the ‘bewildered’ industrial community in South Africa. At the same time, with growth in energy demand having shifted towards non-OECD countries, international bodies started to help developing countries to better manage energy use.
“After the blackouts, the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy met with UNIDO to draft a project plan and, in 2010, the IEE-Project was launched through the NCPC-SA, with funding from the British (DFID) and Swiss (SECO) funding agencies and additional contributions from our own Department of Trade, Industry and Competition (the dtic).
“This was a world first and it became the model for the rest of world, which now has IEE projects in 30 different countries,” Hartzenburg says.
Initially, the project encountered great suspicion: “Why are you talking to us, why are you not talking to Eskom?” was routinely asked at industry sites. He tells of an early experience at Johnson Matthey’s Germiston factory, the producer of platinum group catalysts for catalytic converters and hydrogen fuel cells. “Our consultant made an appointment, was met in reception and given three minutes to present our case.
“That was in 2012. One year later, an energy management system was implemented and the company had saved 9.4 GWh of energy, worth R8.7-million at that time. Two years later, the Germiston factory was ISO 50001-certified, and in 2016 we were called back to capture the good work done. By then, Johnson Matthey had reduced its total demand by 30%. As a result, the British head office asked the Germiston plant to lead international energy management initiatives across the company’s nine other plants,” Hartzenburg recalls.
Many of the early interventions were simple: Alarms to indicate when there was no load on conveyors, for example, reminding someone to manually switch the motor off. Compressed air systems were optimised and leaks were proactively found and repaired. The Johnson Matthey plant also invested R600 000 to refurbish a calcining oven to improve insulation and temperature control, which added a significant percentage to the initial R8.7-million in savings,” Hartzenburg informs MechChem Africa.
“Because our energy was cheap, industry had become wasteful. The start of load shedding created the ‘burning platform’ that focused the minds of plant management to the need for change. For ArcelorMittal, for example, softening steel prices, shrinking market share and rising costs of input energy – coking coal and electricity – were key drivers for management to adopt different attitudes.
“Through the Mining and Industrial Energy Optimisation (MIEO) seminars, we presented the key shift from installing more energy efficient components such as IE3 motors, to looking for bigger gains by making improvements to whole production and energy usage systems. This is now widely embraced and we can confidently say we have changed the way things are done. By first looking at the specific energy needs of the process, we can make bigger changes to efficiency, removing throttling controls on pumps and fans, for example, and using VSDs to run the motors at slower speeds. Low cost system-wide initiatives routinely achieve savings of 15 to 35% across a whole plant,” he notes.
He says that South Africa was ripe for these interventions. At a steel mill, for example, a chiller and a pump farm were being used to supply cooling water for a hot strip mill. The water was being taken down 18 °C, but then transported through half a kilometre of uninsulated piping before getting to the mill,” he recalls.
The initial IEE Project was funded until 2014, but the work was too compelling, so it was extended for a further year. “After that, the implementing agent UNIDO went to the World Bank’s Global Environmental Facility (GEF), which agreed to fund a second phase of the project for a further five years, taking us to where we are today,” he continues.
The second phase had two very sharp focus areas: To overcome finance issues, a financial mechanism was added to accelerate implementation. “We also started to implement gender mainstreaming as a sharp focus, not only to encourage women to become active participants in industry, but to balance the roles and skills sets of women and men in the workplace. Today, 67% of the IEE Project team are women and the IEE Project pioneered a very successful Women in Energy movement.
A mid-term review by UNIDO in 2019 indicated that while the project was exceptional in its focus on meeting KPIs, it was very mature in that it had adapted to changing conditions. By way of example, Hartzenburg says one of the KPIs was to extend the offering of energy systems optimisation and energy management training courses to include TVET colleges. “When the TVET policy changed, we engaged with the universities of technology instead – CPUT, TUT, VUT, MUT – to offer our training courses as post-graduate modules.
“We also trained college lecturers to become ISO 50001 energy management trainers. As a result, our training is now able to bridge the gap between graduates and plant technicians, giving engineers some practical know-how and the technicians the background theory needed to understand their systems,” he adds.
Due to the success of IEE Project energy management and energy systems optimisation courses, new employment and career opportunities have also been spawned. “We now have an energy management business services sector. Before the IEE Project was launched, we had a database of about nine consultants. Today we can draw on more than 100 energy experts, mostly trained by us,” he points out.
Looking to the future, Hartzenburg notes that mature companies are now experiencing diminishing returns from conventional optimisation strategies, so the IEE Project has begun helping them to implement cleaner energy combinations of PV solar, wind, natural gas engines and energy storage: hybrid solutions that not only reduce emissions and improve energy efficiency, they also reduce dependence on an unreliable electricity grid.
“We are also harnessing the power of digitalisation and 4IR to find and respond to energy saving opportunities, and we are starting to see some global best practice examples. We can now predict the failure of steam traps before they fail and cause production losses, and use connected pressure, temperature and flow monitoring to rapidly respond to changes in a plant’s demand for steam,” explains Hartzenburg.
Another less heralded role of the NCPC-SA is the support for the South African Government to develop better energy policies. “We engage in processes such as the IRP, the National Energy Efficiency Strategy, 12ℓ tax incentives and the dtic’s Green Cape Renewable Energy Master Plan, for example,” he adds.
While the IEE Project will not be extended beyond 2021: “We can’t stop doing the good things we are doing. So we have developed a plan to keep the NCPC-SA as a driver of energy efficiency initiatives – because we have a long journey ahead of us.
“Listening to the AEE virtual awards ceremony, I was blown away that a project born in South Africa had achieved such high international status against the best international competition in the world,” he says.
Concluding, Hartzenburg asks: “What might have happened to South Africa’s electricity grid and its industries had the NCPC-SA and the IEE Project not been around?”
