Case studies

Talbot Plastics has installed an electric moulding machine which only uses 35% of the energy used by the old hydraulic machine. The new machine's average load for 120 plastic injection ‘shots' per hour is 2.5kW, compared with 8kW for the old one.

The company now saves $4,500 in total costs and delivers CO2 savings of nearly 11.8 tonnes a year. The new unit uses only 35% of the energy used by the old hydraulic machine.

Christchurch specialty meats producer Verkerks is paying for a lot less energy after taking a fresh look at how it generates heat and processes waste.

By converting the boiler to burn tallow, a meat processing byproduct, Verkerks will likely cut their energy costs by $150,000 a year.

The boiler at the company's processing plant produces steam for heating the smoke houses and fermenting rooms, and water heating.

Until recently the boiler operated only on diesel, consuming around 7,000 litres - and thousands of dollars - every week.

People power is Telecom’s greatest weapon in the battle for energy savings. A staff culture change and internal leadership is making the difference to their energy use. The Energy Manager works hard to get all staff on board via a number of different initiatives, including energy efficiency campaigns, the use of "Energy Rangers", energy audits and the use of different technologies to reduce energy use across this large corporate.

This farm installed a heat exchange system - it extracts the heat from the waste water and uses it to pre-warm the incoming water in the dairy shed. It reduces energy use as less energy is needed to heat each new batch of water to the 85 degrees celsius required for the next wash.

Monitoring has shown that the system is on target to achieve an annual energy saving of 30%. That equates to a cut in CO2 emissions of about one tonne a year.