Advancing Renewables in the Manufacturing Sector

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The Advancing Renewables Manufacturing Sector project will help Queensland manufacturers improve their energy productivity, reduce emissions and drive sector improvements through energy assessments, a web-based portal, knowledge sharing and public forums.Key resultsERM Power conducted energy assessments across twenty manufacturing sites in Queensland including 13 businesses predominantly using electricity and 7 sites with gas-based manufacturing processes. The assessments showed that:Manufacturing energy costs across Queensland can be reduced by $88m per year.Project participants can reduce their annual energy costs by an average of 27% with a collective capital investment of $29m.While manufacturing businesses are diverse in operation, scale and production plant used, 5 common opportunities are replicable across the different manufacturing sub-sectors and have attractive business cases: lighting, Variable Speed Drives (VSD), heat recovery, burner controls and compressed air.Only 10% of businesses assessed had solar installed, demonstrating a low rate of solar PV adoption, despite participants having good awareness of potential benefits (on-site renewable energy generation could reduce the grid energy consumption by about 9% with an average simple payback of 5 to 7 years).Eight potential electrification or decarbonisation of gas-based processes projects were identified across sites with gas-based manufacturing processes. Two large scale electrification projects had acceptable returns of less than 5 years of simple payback, without accounting for any potential price of emissions.A web-based digital education platform was designed and built specifically for the manufacturing sector to remove information barriers, build energy skills and knowledge through the curation of a collection of relevant information, case studies and interactive tools.

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