by Brianna Crandall — December 13, 2010—The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced on December 9 the first industrial plants in the country to be certified under the Superior Energy Performance program—a new, market-based industrial energy efficiency certification program. The program is accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and will serve as a roadmap for industrial facilities to continually improve their efficiency and maintain market competitiveness.
DOE presented three companies with awards during the World Energy Engineering Congress in Washington, D.C., recognizing their successful completion of the certification program and their place as some of the energy leaders within the U.S. manufacturing sector: Cook Composites and Polymers Co. (Houston, TX), Freescale Semiconductor Inc. (Austin, TX), and Owens Corning (Waxahachie, TX).
These plants participated in the Superior Energy Performance program’s pilot, which began in May 2008 as a partnership between DOE and Texas Industries of the Future, located at the University of Texas at Austin. Additional Energy Management Demonstration projects are now underway in other regions around the country.
Along with support from DOE, the U.S. Council for Energy Efficient Manufacturing (U.S. CEEM) is leading the development of Superior Energy Performance to help companies conform to the upcoming International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 50001 energy management system standard, which could eventually influence up to 60 percent of the world’s energy demand.
The Superior Energy Performance program is expected to be well positioned to provide a transparent, globally accepted system for validating energy intensity performance improvement and management practices. The program is already serving as the basis for the Global Superior Energy Performance initiative, a multi-country effort to create and harmonize nationally accredited energy performance certification programs.
To learn more about industrial energy efficiency, visit DOE’s Industrial Technologies Program Web site.
