Mr. Deepak Kumar Gupta – AGM Facility Operations, DAIMLER was one among the presenters and his presentation brief is given below.
Mr. Deepak started his presentation with a formal introduction about Daimler and its various business divisions. In Tamil Nadu, they have their manufacturing unit in Chennai near Oragadam. His colleague Mr. Arumugam took over the presentation and explained about the energy monitoring activities at their Chennai plant.
They have installed about 3.3 MW solar PV plant in their car parking, test track area and in rooftop of warehouse building. Overall 70% of their energy needs come from renewables, in which the above solar system contributes about 15% of it and the remaining comes from other sources like Windmills. As a green initiative, they have planted about 16,000 trees around their factory premises.Their hazardous waste is coprocessed and utilized as an AFR for cement production.
As a company, they have a firm Environment Management Programme and they make following actions under it;
- Optimum A/C operation in the plant using smart controller
- Optimum operation of chiller systems in the paint unit
- Auto timer controller for lightings
- VFD installed after making series of energy audits
- More than 8 lakh units of power savings achieved
- Zero liquid discharge unit
- STP treated water for gardening & toilets
- Water pond management
- SCADA based energy monitoring – Energy meter, Water flow meter & Propane flow meter
- Centralized energy monitoring using sub systems
- Overall by using the above energy conservation techniques, they were able to conserve 24% of energy, 7% of water, 24% wastewater treatment and 15% propane.
- Daimler Chennai unit has been awarded with the Golden Peacock Environment Award for their energy conservation practices in their plant facility.
Q&A session:
It was asked about the payback and maintenance of the solar system they have installed. For which he replied about the payback term and mentioned that top management was also interested in their green initiatives and several such initiatives are in pipeline. Regarding the maintenance it’s only the panel cleaning playing a major role since the plant is located near national highways which forms more dust accumulation on panels. Also, people suggested about floating solar concepts and asked about their waste heat recovery system and he replied that heat recovery system was being used in their paint shop.
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