The first 10 years of the Group‘s EnergieEffizienz project – An outstanding success story

The “EnergieEffizienz“ project was launched in the year 2009. The aim of the project is to bundle the resources and activities of individual Group areas in order to best leverage the existing potentials and cost efficiencies in terms of energy savings. Our operational energy management was tasked with introducing work groups in all company areas in order to motivate all employees to save energy and to make the most of the potentials inherent to ideas and improvement suggestions. Accordingly, a project steering group convenes three to four times a year and exchanges information on the success achieved and the individual measures implemented. To date, a total of 420 individual “EnergieEfffizienz“ project measures have been identified. The measures are always carefully examined in terms of their technical viability and economic efficiency. In the meantime,  some 247 measures have already been implemented.

 

Since launching the project, energy savings of 20,000 TJ have been achieved, while CO2 emissions have been curbed by more than one million tons. The annual energy savings effects attributable to the implemented measures amount to some 3.300 TJ/a – and are trending upwards – and equal 3.8% of our total energy consumption, enough to completely supply 55,000 households with energy1). This is most certainly an impressive result. And this is also the opinion of “Deutsche Energie-Agentur“, abbreviated as dena. Deutsche Energie-Agentur (The German Energy Agency) ranks as one of the most widely acknowledged energy efficiency institutions, and not only in Germany. In recent years, dena has repeatedly awarded SZFG projects, as well as individual energy efficiency measures.

 

The basic idea behind many good measures often derives from improvement suggestions. This demonstrates the fact once again that the foundation for the successful course of our “EnergieEffizienz“ project is and remains the strong commitment, the ingenuity and constructive cooperation of all members of staff.

1) Calculation of energy demand for average single-family house (130m²; FY > 1990):
Natural gas: approx. 10,000kWh Ho/a * 3.244 MJ/kWh Ho = 32,444 MJ/a
Electricity: approx. 3,000kWh el. * 10 MJ/kWh el = 30,000 MJ/a
this results in an annual energy demand of 62.444MJ/a and approx. 60GJ/a respectively.