Energy Efficiency Thru Process Improvement

Hello, I'm David Boone. I work for Alabama Power. I manage the Technology Application Center here in (Clear), Alabama. I welcome you to the Alabama Power Energy Efficiency Seminar Series, and I hope you get a lot of good information out of it, something certainly education and something you can take back to your work.

Today, I want to talk about other resources with Alabama Power. In particular, I want to talk about the Technology Application Center. And the question I had up on there, what is energy efficiency, I want you to think about that. If I asked each of you to take out a piece of paper and write down the definition of energy efficiency, I believe I'd get a different answer from every one of you. And some of you might be thinking about energy efficiency in the home, some in your automobile and truck, some at your work location. But I'm not going to define energy efficiency. What I'd like to do is present some projects that Alabama Power in partnership with their customers have worked here at the Technology Application Center. Maybe you can draw the conclusion from these presentations or these examples of projects of what energy efficiency might be.

The first one we have up here is a picture of an ATV fiberglass hood. You can tell it's got a camouflage as a decal. The decal requires a clear coat -- clear coats are used even on your automobile to protect that nice base coat. On this, it's protecting the decal itself. Clear coats are generally thermal cured coatings, but UV coatings have found their way into industry, particularly in the automobile industry. All your headlights now are plastic. Plastic does scratch and you have to put a coating on there. And they put a UV clear coat coating, so the automobile industry has lead the way in these coatings along with Europeans.

We have customers here in Alabama that are looking at the UV technology for their applications such as that ATV hood or this brake shoe where you are trying to provide a brake shoe that doesn't rust, so you're putting a clear coat on there. Again, typically the clear coats have been thermal cure process coatings requiring BTUs. In this case, generally for this, this is a 20 minute in a convection oven that sized at about a million and a half BTUs. But with the clear coat UV technologies, you can take that down to seconds. And you can look at about 37,000 BTUs per hour operations versus that one and half million BTU hour per operation.

The next project I'd like to present as an example is the burn-off technology. This little picture on the left side is part of an extrusion head. It's nylon on there. I want to show you how gooey it was. These extrusion heads -- these two are in the textile industry are used to generate those synthetic fibers. And they require periodic cleaning. The one on the right is a 16-inch extrusion head with 36,000 holes in it. Every one of those holes got to be cleaned. Again the typical process for cleaning those is a thermal process. In the case of the extrusion head on the right, it took a 6 hour thermal clean process to get that head cleaned and to get the line back in to production. But with the customer working with the technology application center, we came up with a process that requires a 20-minuite IR burn. So we've taken a 6 to 8 hour process down to 20 minutes. And you can look at the BTUs. That's 342,000 BTUs an hour. If you do the math, that'd be 6 hours versus the 20 minutes at a 205,000 BTU per hour oven. This is just another example. So there's a lot of extrusion head processes in Alabama, and best technology is being shared and implemented with our customers.

The third project example I'd like to give is an induction. In this example, we're coding pipe with a powder coat. Again, the typical way -- the traditional way to do this is to apply the coating and put a thermal energy on there -- convection energy, generally in this example a 2.2 million BTU a hour thermal process. We worked with this customer to come up with a faster online system and used induction to cure that same coating on this piece of pipe in three seconds. And that shows you the difference between a 2.2 million BTU thermal oven versus a 75 KW induction unit.

All these projects are examples -- they're pre-examples of hundreds of projects that would work at the technical application center in partnership with our customers. And what -- the TAC goal, that's the short for Technical Application Center, is that we assist industry to maintain their competitive edge in this global market. We do have providing technical demonstrations here at the center. We do product testing, such as some of the examples I just gave. We do technical assistance, and that would involve, for example, working with some of our engineers and vendors, partners that we have. We put on seminars such as the one you're attending today, and we provide information that maybe you are seeking an answer to a question. Use Alabama Power as a resource. We may be able to come up with that answer.

Sounds interesting? How do I get started? The way to get started is to contact your industrial account manager. If you do not know who that is, ask somebody in your plant. If they don't know, you can call Alabama Power and they'll tell you who your account manager is.

Let's go through a problem. If you partner with Technology Application Center, generally what happens is that the account manager becomes the project manager on the Alabama Power side. The customer in turn has a project manager on their side. You would identify the problem. Of course that's very important. You'd evaluate the resources that are available on our side of Alabama Power and the resources that are available on the customer side and resources available with vendors.

In this case, this is a friction plate out of automatic transmission. One of our customers in Alabama, let's use it as an example. Currently they have a glue on here that they cure out. They put the friction plates on there. They pile these things up about that high. They put them their 3,000 PSI. They stick it in an oven for 40 minutes. They were looking for a faster way to do that, and we followed this process in identifying the problem, looking at the resources, and working out a solution and investigating several ways to do this. Some projects you come up with many solutions and you look at which one is probably the simplest to implement.

In this case, we looked at induction, where instead of doing it in a stack of several hundred, we would do it in an individual, and we come up with a solution along with the customer where the friction plate's put on there. It's put into a press. Induction is applied at half KW for a half a second to make this friction plate pass all its property. It didn't [inaudible] pass all the quality controls. It's a solution that may not be implemented for several years because of the concern of putting millions of these out in automobiles. But it gives you an example of how a project is worked between the partnership between Alabama Power and with the customer.

We -- we appreciate your business. Just like you and just like us with our customers, we would not be in business, but this is a --