The opportunity to save over VND 10 billion per year in a steel manufacturing company

28/10/2011

Dinh Vu Steel JSC (Dinh Vu Economic Zone - Dong Hai Ward - Hai An District – Hai Phong) is the first commercial steel embryo manufacturing enterprise in the North. With the capacity of 200,000 tons per year, electricity consumed in the production process of the plant is very large. With the desire to reduce energy costs and improve product quality, the company has implemented energy audits.

The scale of the company consists of an embryo plant, an oxygen plant, a pig iron plant, 10 departments and a representative office in Laos. After a period of testing and adjusting equipment from Mar 19th, 2006 to the end of 2006, equipment of the company has been relatively stable and met production requirements, the company's workers have mastered the equipment and technology.

However, according to the evaluation of energy audit experts at the Center of Energy Efficiency and Cleaner Production in Hai Phong, the potential of power consumption reduction of the company is still very large. Taking advantage of that potential, the business shall significantly reduce production costs and show its social responsibility with the environment and community.

Representative of Dinh Vu Steel Joint Stock Company, General Manager Huang Tony, has also expressed his desire to find ultimate solutions to make use of energy wasted in the production process of the company. Immediately after the solutions are determined, the management of the company will deploy from simple solutions to complex ones to gradually save energy.

The previous statistics show that energy consumption of the company is very large, about 120 million kWh per year. According to analysis of the energy audit team, to implement energy saving, first of all, the company should to set up an Energy management group with specific provisions on the duties, authorities, rewards and penalties related to energy efficiency, especially for areas with high potential of waste such as the photovoltaic furnace system, waste classification system, exhaust treatment system and oxygen factory.

From the analysis results, the energy audit team has identified that the amount of saved electricity of the company is about 10.2 million kWh per year which accounts for 0.9% of total electricity consumption of the plant. This value is equivalent to VND 10.2 billion per year.

Some big solutions are replacing T10fluorescent bulbs with T5 bulbs; replacing 400W high-pressure lamps with 150W low-pressure sodium lamps; installing inverters for the cool water pumping system; installing inverters for the engines of bridge cranes and installing accumulators for the oxygen production system.

With five solutions mentioned above, the estimated initial investment is VND 7.5 billion. Thus, the payback period for the implementation of energy efficiency is only about 7 months.

By Minh Duc

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