Doncasters, Blaenavon

THE CLIENT
Doncasters is a leading international engineering group. It manufactures precision components and assemblies for the aerospace, industrial gas turbines, specialist automotive fasteners and petrochemical markets. Doncasters excels at working with alloys and metals that are difficult to shape and form.

THE BRIEF
With an energy bill of £1.4million at Doncasters’ Blaenavon site, the vast majority of which is spent on gas and electricity, RUMM was asked to look at ways of reducing energy consumption thus improving profits. The main focus of this was to design and install an automatic monitoring and targeting system (aM&T) to monitor consumption.

THE PLAN
RUMM installed a sub-metering aM&T system which provided Doncasters with half hourly data in order to identify those areas where savings could be made.

In order to ensure everyone was able to understand how the system worked and where the plant was using excess energy, the RUMM team worked closely with the incumbent energy team, in order to identify how electricity and gas were being distributed and the key areas in which they were being used.

THE RESULTS
By evaluating opportunities for savings within the thermal efficiency field, and optimising ‘waste heat’ to minimise temperature dissipation, RUMM was able to bring energy consumption down by 27%, giving the Blaenavon plant a saving of £1million over 2 years, against a 40% increase in sales.

This also resulted in Doncasters receiving an Energy Management Award in 2007. Such was the success of the work in Blaenavon, Doncasters also asked RUMM to install its energy management solution at four other plants in the UK. Since installation, a total of £3.6million has been saved in energy consumption costs, equating to 11,800 tonnes of CO2 emissions.

WHY IT WORKED
Using RUMM’s full energy management solution including on-going consultation and planning combined with cutting edge technology allowed Doncasters to clearly identify those areas of high energy consumption and focus its efforts in order to set specific objectives that reduced energy consumption. As well as looking at existing manufacturing methods, the company was able to test, prior to install new systems in order to identify any future energy consumption problems and fix them in advance. This gave the company immediate and effective results.

“The service we have had from RUMM has been first class. Such was the project’s initial success, we installed at a further four sites and continue to look at other sites where RUMM’s intelligent
monitoring can be used.”

— Group Energy Manager, Doncasters

Print PDF