In Tampere on April 5, 2023
Climate change and global warming are significant challenges that are driving companies to change their operations and reduce their carbon emissions rapidly. Valmet believes that technology plays a crucial role in mitigating climate change and global warming and in the transition towards a carbon-neutral economy.
At SmartAir, we provide energy-saving measures as a service to industries that use compressed air.
Valmet in Tampere wanted to investigate the company's use of compressed air and see if there were any possible measures that could make the current system more efficient and achieve savings.
Compressed air is one of the most important utilities, right after electricity. Very typically, companies use approximately 10% of all the electricity they consume to produce and process compressed air. Since this figure is so significant, relatively small “everyday innovations” can achieve significant savings, says Sami Uusi-Erkkilä from SmartAir And Energy Oy.
Valmet lists on its website the goal “Reduction of -80% carbon dioxide emissions from its own operations by 2030”. There are several good goals on the list and we are focusing on the one mentioned on the list: “Improving energy efficiency at sites”.
We conducted a one-day compressed air system survey at Valmet's Tampere unit in Lahdesjärvi in March 2023. The site already uses an energy-saving frequency converter-controlled screw compressor with a nominal power of 37 kW, which adjusts its output according to the current need "required" from production. According to our calculations, which take into account the actual annual operating hours of the compressor, we concluded that the amount of energy used by the compressor in question is 85,400 kWh per year, based on the information received from the compressor controller. After an analysis performed in the equipment room, we performed a leak detection of the compressed air system in production, using the latest and most advanced imaging technology.
In the final stage, the results of the description are analyzed, and a clear, detailed report is created, which includes the amount of compressed air and energy lost, as well as the resulting financial losses and CO2 emission load. Perhaps the most interesting part of the report is precisely the amount of energy lost and the CO2 emission impact, summarizes Sami Uusi-Erkkilä from SmartAir And Energy. In their case, we ended up with a value of 23,280 kWh per year, which would be the maximum savings potential when all the actions mentioned in the report have been completed. We have calculated that achieving that energy saving would take about 32 working hours and cost less than 2,000 euros in materials, so we encourage you to implement it.
Yrjö Vähäsaari, Julia Kittilä, Sami Uusi-Erkkilä SmartAir And Energy Oy
From Valmet, Yrjö Vähäsaari and Julia Kittilä were involved in the project, and a big thank you to both of them for making the project possible to start and complete.
Article and photo
Sami Uusi-Erkkilä