261: Energy Transition Explained: How Manufacturers Can Save Energy and Build a Sustainable Future featuring Veregy’s Eric Spink & Shiva Subramanya

Having a sustainability goal is important, but having a sustainability plan is key, right? And the sustainability plan needs to include how we are going to implement this, and how we are going to pay for it. What are the key stakeholders that you need to bring together to make a sustainability journey happen? I think putting the right kind of leadership around it is going to ensure that we can get on that sustainability journey. Welcome to Manufacturing Happy Hour, the podcast where we get real about the latest trends and technologies impacting modern manufacturers. Happy touch ring! Happy each week. We interview industry experts that are at the top of their craft, and give you the tools, tactics and strategies. You need to take your career and your business to the next level. And now your host, Chris Luki. Hey, what's up folks? It's episode 261. Today we're talking all about energy transition. How many manufacturers can save energy and build a sustainable future? Today we're chatting with Eric Spink and Shiva Subramanya of Verigee. Verigee is an award-winning, Nesco accredited energy services company focusing on accelerating and simplifying the energy transition. So, here are three things you can expect from this episode. First, we'll define energy transition and discuss a number of different opportunities for energy savings, including on-site generation options, as well as really low-hanging fruit opportunities. Second, we have a lot of stories illustrating what energy transition projects look like. From leveraging advanced controls and pizza manufacturing to multi-site HVAC projects, and even the role of artificial intelligence in improving energy usage, we're going to cover all of these. Finally, be thinking about where your company might have opportunities for some of these sustainability efforts. Eric and Shiva will give their advice on all of that right at the end of this conversation. Hey, as always, if you want to learn more, make sure to go to the Shunuts page at manufacturingHapyour.com/261. That's 261. And thank you to Rockwell Automation for making this episode possible. We've been doing what I would call a solution series featuring integrators, EPCs, etc. And this is the final episode in that series. More on that at the end of the conversation. But in the meantime, let's meet up with Shiva and Eric. Hey, Eric, Shiva. Good to have you both on manufacturingHapyour today. We're going to be talking about energy and energy transition. And since that's a term that I imagine a good portion of our industrial audiences somewhat familiar with, but I think it's one worth defining a little bit more. Shiva, if you're having a beverage with someone hanging out with someone, how do you describe what energy transition is? Traditionally in manufacturing and in other sectors, energy was just an expense, right? I mean, it's for the cost of doing business. But it is no longer the case because energy has serious implications in terms of resilience, sustainability and what the company does. So what has happened is there is a lot of attention being paid to how energy is produced, how energy is transmitted, where it's coming from. And most importantly, how it is used to make something either a widget or a process or a comfort application, any of those people are paying attention to what it is. And that kind of determines what energy transition is. I mean, that's quite an important concept going forward that everyone needs to pay attention to. And we're going to be jumping into energy transition from the perspective of what what a project looks like in that regard today, whether it's manufacturing, whether it's HFAC, you know, one element that plays into energy transition. Or I should say an angle we're going to be approaching it from is the advanced controls angle. There's a large portion of our audience that's within the automation space. So Eric, I feel like if I were to ask you this question over a beverage, you might have a slightly different answer on what energy transition is or I should say maybe how controls an automation play into that. So let's say we're having that beer. How do you answer that question? Yeah, so I mean, advanced controls plays a critical role right in the energy transition. You know, traditionally, plants have focused on industrial automation to run their processes, right, the packaging lines, their process lines, and very little investment in advanced controls or even rudimentary controls was placed in the, you know, the secondary utilities. You know, those systems and a manufacturing plant that consume a lot of times a vast majority of the energy, you know, such as boilers and compressed air systems and only refrigeration, HFAC equipment, chillers, you know, you name it historically investment has been put in those in those controls and they aren't controlled very efficiently. So as time has progressed, you know, as technology has improved with PLC controls, you know, getting a lot of feedback from production, you know, these systems are are now able to operate much more efficiently to reduce KWH to reduce terms and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. You know, lately now with the invent, you know, the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning, that's becoming another kind of layer on top of industrial automation that's improving the energy efficiency of these of these systems. And I want to dive into some of those stories later on because I've seen the breadth of projects you've taken on and admittedly, it seems to cover every element of advanced controls, AI, the different types of energy, whether it's on site, whether it's from the grid. There's a lot we can dive into today. The one area I want to kind of go behind the scenes on first though is verigy because as I understand, verigy evolved from being more of like a, let's say manufacturing centric a little more generalist in the work you did and now you've really doubled down as a sustainability front runner in a lot of ways. So Shiva, can you share a bit of like maybe why that occurred and I have a feeling it might have something to do with just the opportunity around energy projects right now. Right, right. I mean, verigy is a has been in the energy business for the last 30 plus years. Typically, verigy in the past was very focused on what they call the mush market, which is the schools, colleges, municipalities, those kind of customers is what verigy focused on. But in the last few years, we have really focused on the industrial sector because the industrial sector represents a very unique opportunity for for the for verigy and for the industry itself because with the advent or with the impetus on sustainability with the impetus on making our manufacturing process more efficient. There is a huge opportunity like Eric was talking about all the opportunities that get presented with advanced controls and artificial intelligence and. And also the fact that we have a very aging infrastructure in the in our industrial plants that have not seen the kind of investment that should have been made to keep it at the forefront of what technology can offer. All of this present a very unique opportunity and so that is one side of the equation and the other side of the equation is all the corporations have sustainability goals have made promises to UN agencies and other places about what they'll be able to do from a sustainability perspective and energy efficiency and energy transition is a critical piece in that puzzle without which they cannot reach their sustainability goals. So a combination of those two present a very unique opportunity for people to take advantage of in the current times. Yeah, and I like to add a very G is a performance contractor right where energy services performance contractor traditionally industrials manufacturing companies have relied on you know using their own capital for implementing projects energy efficiency sustainability projects. But those projects always you know compete with productivity projects and you know historically over the years it's been a challenge right to get a customer to you know cough up a few million dollars to upgrade you know controls when they have competing projects that they need to do to increase. productivity. Verage has been able to bring in these performance guarantees, financing options that use the savings from the energy reductions to implement the projects. So they're able to offer an opportunity for our customers to not use capital, music capital elsewhere, but still implement these projects. And that's really allowed us to really move up to the forefront of this space. Great point of clarification there. And we've been talking a little bit about energy transition in, I would say some general standpoints. I want to get a little specific here too. I mean, you help manufacturers understand where their opportunities for energy improvements. Like what are a few of the areas that are low-hanging fruit? Let's start with those. Some of the ones that the manufacturing leaders listening to this podcast might not even notice, but could be some of the easy wins. Shiva, I see you nodding, nodding your head. So I'm going to send this to you first. Yeah, I mean, I think Eric started talking about secondary utilities. Right? So it is, so if you walk around a manufacturing floor, we always talk about the perimeter of the manufacturing floor. That's where you have your compressed air systems, your boilers, your refrigeration and HVSE equipment. And oftentimes what people don't recognize is they consume 60 to 80 percent of the energy used to use H in a manufacturing plant. And the manufacturing equipment itself uses this secondary utilities because they are trying to increase the pressure, cool heat. All of those things come from this outside sources that are outside on the perimeter of the plant that's coming into the plant. Right? And manufacturers typically haven't had experience and expertise in these systems, which are not actually their manufacturing, but their support utilities. And that's where all the low hanging fruits are to improve efficiency. And we often find fantastic paybacks, you know, between one and five years that they can get a quick return on their investment. And like Eric talked about, I mean, if they want to use their capital, we bring capital, whichever rate goes, those are fantastic opportunities for a customer. And there's a lot of low hanging fruit in a manufacturing plant that doesn't require capital, right? It's good maintenance programs. You know, I mean, one of the, you know, probably the largest low hanging fruit that, you know, doesn't necessarily use capital to fix our leaks, right? I mean, there's steam leaks, there's water leaks, there's air leaks, there's refrigerant leaks. You know, all of these waste a lot of energy. So, you know, you don't need capital to necessarily fix those. You just need a good maintenance program to fix all those leaks on a regular basis. You know, it doesn't, doesn't work doing it once a year or once every couple years. You know, we strongly recommend our customers to implement these leak management practices on a at least accordingly basis, if not more frequently. And you can get 10 to 15% savings just on fixing the leaks. Okay. I'm going to do a quick summary then. So, you know, like you were just saying, areas that don't require capital are an area of low hanging fruit. You specifically talked about leaks, 15% approximate type savings there. Shiva, you were talking about secondary utilities, boilers, HVAC. And I want to make sure I understood this appropriately. 60 to 80% of that is consumed by the manufacturing process, if you will. But the manufacturers typically aren't, that's not the area they're specialized in. They're not specialized in HVAC. They're not specialized in boilers. And as a result, that's why oftentimes they're consuming more energy than they need to be. So when you address that, the payback could be, I think you were saying within one to five years. Did I capture that right? Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's where that's exactly why the opportunity is significant because that is not their core expertise. I mean, somebody, let's take an example of somebody making milk. I mean, they are, they have engineering expertise on how to pasteurize, how to homogenize, how to cool, how to store the milk. I mean, all those are key aspects of manufacturing milk that they have key expertise in. But there is a lot of support equipment that goes into making that happen, which uses most of the energy in a plan that is not necessarily the core expertise of the manufacturer. And they rely on outside vendors, other consultants to, you know, support them on. And that's where we feel the biggest opportunity is because that is the area that when we go and address in a plan, we improve the efficiency significantly. So Eric, I'm going to ask you this one. I'm kind of going to go a bit on the opposite end of how I asked this question. We talked about low hanging fruit. And I wouldn't be surprised maybe if there's some overlap between your answer here and the answers that you both just gave. But what are some high payback areas, right? Things that aren't necessarily the low hanging fruit. Maybe these are a little deeper in the evaluations that you do, but are there like really high payback areas as well that we haven't discussed beyond the leaks in the secondary utilities. Yeah. Yeah. If you recall earlier in the discussion, I, you know, I'd mentioned traditionally, you know, companies have not invested significantly in the secondary utilities, especially around controls. So, you know, upgrading control systems, putting in PLC-based controls, that controls these equipment, add a lot of instrumentation and metering. Historically, have, you know, yielded very, very high paybacks, you know, one and a half to two year paybacks in many cases. You know, these advanced controls, you know, really do allow all these systems to operate, consuming a lot less energy. Also, variable frequency drives, VFDs on pumps, fans or blowers, historically have provided, you know, very, very high payback. You know, obviously you need to vast control systems to control them effectively and intelligently. So, combining the PLC controls with variable frequency drives on pumps and fans throughout the manufacturing plant, historically, yielded, you know, really, really great paybacks. Yeah, I'm going to maybe ask for some specific examples here because I've had the opportunity to read through a number of case studies for Verge, the type of projects you've taken on. And Eric, let's stick with your example right now. You know, one example I saw was, I believe like a freezer at a pizza manufacturing plant where advanced controls had, based on the product, allowed the manufacturer to optimize the way they were leveraging energy within that freezer. That's one example I came across. Eric, I'm not sure if that's one you can speak to or if you have another example where it's like, hey, this is really kind of a perfect story that illustrates what advanced controls can do for energy savings. Yeah, no, I can definitely speak to that project. I mean, that was a very high payback project. It was actually under 1.6 years. And it involved upgrading the controls of a spiral freezer at a pizza plant. What is a spiral freezer? I think we should probably define that for the audience. Yeah, so spiral freezer runs on ammonia refrigeration, right? So, and it's a very low temp. So in this case, temperature was minus 20 degrees. So the pizza gets prepared, it runs through an oven and gets baked. And then the customer then freezes the pizza in order to then ship it to stores as a frozen pizza as the end product. So the spiral freezer essentially keeps the pizza in this minus 20 degree freezer. It spirals to maintain a dwell time within the freezer of typically between 25 and 30 minutes. And then it leaves and then goes to packaging. So that's the freezing process. That freezer has evaporator fans. And these evaporator fans were half a dozen of them in the 20 to 30 horsepower range. So there was a couple hundred horsepower of evaporator fans that essentially run all the time. So the project involved upgrading the controls, adding PLC controls on the spiral freezer so controlled better. control of the dwell time that the pizza remains in the freezer. We added a lot of temperature sensing. We added temperature sensing, you know, within this space to understand different areas within the freezer, what the temperature was, as well as temperature across the evaporator fans. So you've got cold air that, you know, blow through the evaporator that has the ammonia coils in it that allows the air to get cooled down to minus 20 degrees. And then we also added infrared temperature sensors to measure the temperature of the pizza going into the freezer and then coming out of the freezer. Because traditionally what happens is, you know, quality control will measure the product through a probe, you know, afterward, make sure it meets specs. And when it doesn't, you know, someone calls up the refrigeration operator and says, hey, it's not cold enough in here. And they essentially make it a lot colder. And traditionally what happens is you end up over freezing pizza, which is a huge waste of energy. So we were able to, you know, correlate the surface temperatures of the pizza with the advanced controls or able to dynamically change the temperature set points in the freezer. We added VFDs, variable frequency drives on the fans, and able to control the speed of the fans. And not only did it save tremendous amount of energy, it improved the quality of the product, as well as, you know, with a constant speed fans, the air, a lot of times, is blowing like pepperoni off of the pie and just making a mess on the floor. So we were able to control that and provide a much better product. And more importantly, it increased their throughput. So they were able to make more product within the given time, right? So the improvements that they got out of this were tremendous. And I think the key point there is by us having a look at this, we were able to improve the quality, improve the efficiency, improve the throughput. And then now they have a much better product, as a result of that. So that's what we were able to do at this piece of case. Yeah, so this brings up another question, because this is a conversation that has come up on manufacturing happy hour before. It's been a little while, but we often talk about sustainability or energy improvements as, oh, we were doing a throughput or quality project. And by the way, we got some energy savings out of it too. Did this start as an energy focused project that turned into one that had the quality and throughput improvements or was it the other way around? No, it started off as an energy project. They invited us to go into this plant and look at what opportunities are and what we can do for them. And through our investigation, we came up with this project and presented to them that, hey, not only can you improve your energy efficiency, but we can also improve your throughput, your quality. It has all those additional benefits that you are going to gain from this project. And then, you know, because it was very well accepted. And and I think I think Eric kind of touched on it. I mean, they, I think the biggest issue that they had was they always had that probe to figure out what the exit temperature of the piece of us. But we through some clever engineering were able to say, hey, we can do some core relations between the surface temperature and the core temperature. And here is by measuring the surface temperature, we can tell you what the core temperature is. So you don't have to rely on this manual probes to figure out whether your product is reaching the temperature or not. We can automate that process. And that was a huge, huge improvement on that process. And it being an energy project, you know, I mentioned it had a 1.6 year payback or return on investment. That was an energy savings. Right. That doesn't even count the productivity savings and the quality savings. So, you know, you take into account that you've got a very, very attractive project there. Also, Chris, I want to, I mean, this kind of segues into another thing that I want to mention. One of the key things is this project qualified for a huge incentive from the utility, the utility bore 30% of the costs of this project roughly because they had an incentive program that we were able to avail of. And in a lot of cases, in a lot of geographies, that is utility incentives that apply to this project that offset the capital cost of this project. And we have developed expertise over the years in capturing the incentive for our customers. So they can get better return on investment on this energy improvement projects. Yeah. I think this is a great example. One, it kind of flips a theme we've heard on manufacturing happy hour before on its head, where a lot of things always start as the throughput, the quality type projects. You can pursue these from an energy standpoint first and yield the quality and throughput improvements as well. And I think that's a great stat that the one and a half year payback on the project investment was solely based on the energy savings. We're not even taking to an account quality and throughput. I thought it was a great example of quality when you think of a big evaporator fan just blowing the pepperonis off of the pizza. I can visualize the type of mayhem that would cause inside of the freezer. But as I listen to it, I think for the audience, there are a lot of aspects that are really intuitive about this example. Right? You're running this freezer at a very low temp. You have very high horsepower fans. So when you talk about controlling the dwell time, adding temperature sensing, sensing across the evaporator fans, making sure you're not over freezing the pizza on the way out. You can imagine how better control over temperature as well as high horsepower equipment can yield that type of savings. So I love the story you provided there. I'm going to ask you for another one as we get further into it. But I'm going to let the audience wait wait on hearing that for a second. I do want to ask you about on-site generation options as well. We've been you you know, Shiva, you were just talking about the utility. But what on-site generation options do you typically evaluate that the manufacturers listening to this should be aware of? I think on-site generation has a couple of dynamic straight one. It can be renewable. Sataz, so a lot of it is a easy example. We have done several solar projects at manufacturing facilities. But also some of the things that we have done over the years is for example, we worked with a beer manufacturer and they had a wish beer that was going down the drain. I can't imagine people wishing beer Chris, but some people do in the manufacturing process. But you know, what we were able to do was to take that wish beer converted into biogas and the biogas made electric power generation at the site, which is completely renewable. Right? Because so there is those kind of opportunities exist. And if people are just looking to save money, sometimes even natural gas generation on-site can be helpful. And all of this provides resiliency for the plants. I mean, imagine you have a hurricane, you have an earthquake, you have a lot of natural events that can offset the power supply to your facility and this generation facilities can provide resiliency to the manufacturing plant. And at least to keep important things going while they get that power restored. Yeah, so I mean, there's, you know, Shiva touched on a few of the technologies, right? Just in general, you know, renewable side, you know, solar and battery storage coupled, you know, a lot of areas of the country. It makes a lot of financial sense in addition to, you know, greenhouse gas reduction because it is a clean renewable energy source. You know, but the, you know, there was an income tax credit under the federal government that, you know, provided 30 to, you know, up to 50 to 60 percent of tax credit on the cost of the project. You know, the recent bill eliminated that for solar, but kept it for battery storage. So that's still viable. But there are other on-site power generation technologies where under that, the one big, beautiful bill, you know, they now are eligible for the 30 percent ITC in those are the fuel cell technologies. So, you know, fuel cell and then there's a newer technology that falls under that category that's known as a linear generator. All of those are flex fuel, but even if they do run a natural gas, they would still be subject to the 30 percent income tax credit. So those could be very economically feasible starting next year. Another on-site power generation that a lot of people don't think of is on-site power generation is geothermal, right? We do a lot of geothermal. I mean, it doesn't produce a lot of electricity, but it does provide healing and cooling within a plant. So that's a good source of renewable energy that that Verge has had a lot of experience doing. Yeah, great great examples across the board. Shiva, I appreciate leading off with a very manufacturing happy hour centric answer. I too can't imagine wasting beer. So I love that you found a way to turn turn waste beer to bio gas. That's a great example. Of course, mentioning traditional options like solar. Eric, you've been talking about how some of those incentives have shifted recently. I love hearing how fuel cells, flex fuel options, those have incentives associated with now that if I'm a manufacturer out there, I'm going to be taking a look at that to see how it applies to my facility. And you're right, even though this is an a power generation example, geothermal, classic example around heating and cooling as well. So I appreciate the breadth of options you've, you've given there. One thing I really want to ask and maybe I should have asked this earlier, but it's a fun mid interview question. When you're talking to companies, how many of them are realistic about their sustainability goals or how many of them even have sustainability goals? Eric, you're laughing. You get to answer this one first. So I think you probably have a good answer to this one. No, I mean, most of our customers have sustainability goals. I mean, that's why we're working with them, right? A lot of them are public companies, fortune 500 companies. A lot of them are private companies that sell their product to fortune 500 companies. And, you know, they all have sustainability goals. You know, they all try to be realistic on what their long term goals are. But you do hear a lot of goals of net zero energy or zero carbon by 2050, you know, 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions or scope one emissions. You know, those are all lofty goals. But one of the things that we find is a lot of our customers don't. They establish the goals, but they don't establish how to pay for it to achieve those goals. Right? So, you know, using their own capital is not going to get there. And that's where, you know, this, you know, what I talked about earlier, you know, performance contracting, you know, energy as a service, energy efficiency as a service, where no capitals require from a customer. Those are going to be the ways to get to those goals. So having these serious talks, you know, with our customers about, okay, how are you going to pay for this five years from now? And, you know, you're only at 20% of your goal and you have, you know, three to five years left. What are you going to do? Are you going to pay for it? So maybe a follow up question on that. It sounds like what I heard. Yes, the majority of companies have sustainability goals. The ones you're working with certainly to, but they don't necessarily always know how they're going to pay for it, finance it, et cetera. And that's where a company like Verge can come in where you're doing performance contracting. So that way it's not coming out of the capital budget per say, but an area where the savings are ultimately paying for the project. Correct. I think it's almost, I like, I think we talked about before, the sustainability projects, Chris, are competing with manufacturing production priorities. And rightfully production priorities always win and sustain a number of key projects. The respective of how good they are. They get pushed to the side yet they have goals. So we constantly go and talk to plant operators, sustainability professionals inside this manufacturing organizations. And that is the constant struggle. Hey, we have a, we want to do it, but our budget got cut this year because we have to do this big production improvement project. And so that's where the priorities always are. And that's why having an alternate way to make this happen is a key way to move the sustainability. Shiva, that brings up another question. And we've kind of touched on it because it's one thing to have the sustainability goals. It's another thing to be taking action around those goals. When you typically walk into a manufacturer and industrial company, are they typically taking some action toward achieving those goals or they stuck based on some of the areas you mentioned, right? Budgets get cut. You have to prioritize other projects. They haven't Eric, as you were talking about earlier, they haven't necessarily figured out how they're going to finance it yet. They might not have discovered, you know, performance contracting option yet. Shiva, when you walk into a place, are people typically taking some of the right actions? None of the right actions. What do you see? Um, I mean, to be fair, they're the widespread. Right. I mean, some, some are more advanced in their sustainability journey than others. But a vast majority of them have goals, but no realistic action plan to achieve them. Meaning the haven't engaged a company like Verity to come and take a look at their plant and to stack around the opportunities and say, Hey, this is, this is our, if our goal is to get to 30% reduction by 2030, here is our realistic plan to accomplish it. Here are the stack ranked opportunities that's going to get me there. And, you know, year one, I need to be doing this. This is the investment I need. So that kind of an action plan is typically lacking in most of the companies that we engage with. But they do have a overall goal. They have a corporate goal, but not a mechanism to accomplish that corporate goal typically or the funding required to accomplish it. So that's where we see huge gaps. And that's where I think starting with that overall action plan and having the will within that organization to go after it. I mean, a lot of these requires changes, right? I mean, you go make some changes like that example or that piece of place. I mean, there's a will on the operations side, on the manufacturing side, on the quality side. Everyone has to come together and say, Hey, this is an important thing for our company to accomplish. And we are going to do it together as a team because it's important. So that leadership and that will and bringing together, there's a lot of things to make this happen. So that is that's where we see a lot of gaps in the sustainability. When when Verge walks in the door, have companies pinpointed an area, we talked about leaks, we talked about secondary utilities. Have they pinpointed an area where they're like, we think this is the energy hog, but we want you to take a more holistic look at this. And are you providing like a menu of options that say, Hey, here's everything we could do. Here's the one like that is glaringly obvious that you need to do first, even if it isn't the part of the process you thought. Is that kind of how it works? Can you give me some behind the scenes there as well? When we go to a facility, we like to talk to the plant engineer, maintenance manager, and we have them explain their process from raw material to the end product, what they do there. And then we walk the plant with them and they do explain typically what they think are the energy hods. And what we do is through our experience over the years, we usually try to understand and come up with the menu of options that are over and beyond what they think is the energy hog. But to be fair, if there is a major issue with any of their equipment where we see something outrageous, we definitely want to address it first. So, you know, we definitely come up with a wide range of options when we walk an initial, you know, do our initial walk through on a plant, you know, it could be 20 to 30 opportunities to save energy. So it's really useful in using that as a kind of a baseline for a roadmap for their sustainability journey. One day in a plant is good to, you know, establish that list, you know, and we're able to, you know, give an estimated savings, estimated costs, if there's any rebates, what the payback is, to really help them rank and understand which ones they should do first and which ones they may need to do later. You know, but then it does take a lot of, you know, more of a deeper dive, right, to go through and develop these projects, you know, which we do. We do those for our customers, you know, at no cost with the ultimate end goal of getting those projects to implementation stage, which is where, you know, where Verger makes our money is building and implementing these projects. Well, let's talk about a couple more projects as we wrap this up. You know, again, we talked about the pizza freezer example earlier. I mean, one that continues to get highlighted that I've seen is, you know, you've helped manufacturers coordinate HVAC across a dozen plus facilities as well. I mean, let's start with a basic example like that. What does that look like? And maybe you can speak to the specific project I've come across, but helping a manufacturer optimize their HVAC strategy across multiple facilities. Steve, if you can lead that off, I've got one Eric that I think is going to be right up your alley after this. That's a bit more advanced control centric. So here is one of the key takeaways that we were talking about before, right? The lack of investment in secondary utilities. So we were working with a food manufacturing plant that has a bunch of HVAC equipment using huge amounts of power. And they were controlled using some proprietary control system that the plant did not have access to and be able to manage their own because it's a proprietary HVAC system. And over time, as changes happen, the system had fallen into despair. And what we were able to do was to integrate a PLC-based control system to control all this HVAC equipment on the roof. So the advantage of what we did was saving huge amounts of energy and getting the incentives from utility and getting a great return on investment was to provide them with a platform that they know how to manage. It was on a system that they're familiar with that they can control. And as the plant changes, they'll be able to manage the energy on a go-forward basis. I think that was a key way that we were able to help this food plant address their HVAC needs. Yeah, and that's one example I wouldn't have necessarily thought of like going from a proprietary system to one that they can manage more effectively in-house. I think that's a great example. And again, one of those, and I'm saying this from a positive standpoint, one of those very basic things that a company can be doing to take control of their energy usage. I also want to look towards the future as well. And one of the most fascinating ones I came across was a project where you're leveraging advanced controls and artificial intelligence in dairy farming. So you're both nodding your heads. I can tell you're both familiar with this project. So, Eric, I'd love you to explain this one and get us kicked off. And then Shiva, you can help us wrap it up. Yeah, yeah. It's actually within a dairy processor. So it's in multiple plants. So actually five plants total. A couple of make process milk. A couple of process. You know, use a very high temp process for cream products such as protein shakes and creamers for coffee and what have you. And then the fifth is a cheese plant. What this did is it, you know, our traditional projects of upgrading the boiler controls, upgrading the refrigeration controls where we put in PLC-based systems, added VFDs, added a lot of instrumentation in meters. So we upgraded those and made those two systems, the steam and the ammonia refrigeration operate much more efficiently. But then we layered artificial intelligence on top of it. And the differentiator here is, you know, steam systems, you know, they look at steam pressure. And, you know, your traditional control strategy is to maintain the proper steam pressure. So the plant can operate. You know, on refrigeration, you know, your set points are, you know, pressure set points, pressure set points at the system that the system looks at. And that's, you know, they operate that way to maintain those. So what implementing AI was allow us to do is get data from the production process itself. Like in the case of the dairy processors, you know, the pasteurization process is a very high energy intensive process that uses steam. It uses chilled water. So we get a lot of feedback, you get milk temperatures, milk flows, steve-valve position, various, you know, chilled water temperatures. All of that process data gets fed back into the AI. And then the AI then allows the steam and refrigeration systems to operate much more effectively because they're able to predict the demand, you know, when high steam loads are required. They will to sequence borders, reset pressure set points automatically and dynamically with, you know, no human interface and allows those systems to operate much, much more efficiently. I mean, plants are dynamic places. They change constantly. And traditionally, control systems have relied on human beings to come up with strategies that are that drive optimization. I think with the AI, I think we are entering the new realm where all the strategies can be dynamically adjusted as things change in the plant. And I think that's going to completely change how we look at control systems and controls in the future because the controls are going to be dynamic. They're going to be smart. They are going to respond to changing conditions in the plant. And it's no longer, I mean, think of a plant that was built five years ago and you go talk to the plant. The plant is not operating the way it was built five years ago. It's operating. A lot of things have changed, a lot of production, things have changed, a lot of processes have changed. But the control strategies were as they put five years ago by some really smart person. And so what this AI is going to provide is to account for the changes as they happen and allow the control systems to dynamically respond to realistic events that are happening in the marketplace within certain parameters. So this is going to completely change and achieve new levels of energy efficiency in the marketplace. So we are very excited about that opportunity. Yeah. So if I'm peering this right to summarize it, you're getting data back from the production process and allowing it to adjust dynamically to what's taking place. And as a result, that's where you're able to achieve your energy savings. Absolutely. Yeah, which is not typically what typically that does not happen right typically. I think Eric bought a very important point there. One of the things that the plant floor data and the utility data traditionally never mix together. They were held in different systems. They never talk to each other. There are no feedback from what's happening in the plant to how a boiler operates, a boiler operates. So there is this, they're on different systems. The boilers were on a proprietary vendor system. The plant floor is operated in a different field system and there are no communication between the two. And having the communication and being able to make dynamic decisions based on that data, I think is going to be a key improvement in the future. So we covered a lot of ground today. We've talked everything from secondary utilities to leaks. We've talked about on-site generation. We've talked about projects that leverage artificial intelligence and advanced controls. Long story short, we've covered a lot of different things. I want to ask each of you what your final tip to the audience would be. And it doesn't need to be anything massive. But what is something you would recommend a manufacturer do when forming their sustainability strategy when looking for opportunities for energy improvements? Eric, if you could give one simple tip and then Shiva, if you could give a quick tip as well, I think that would be a great way to end the conversation and give the manufacturers listening to this some easy homework. Yeah, I mean, the future is in smart manufacturing, right? Having all these secondary utilities that have traditionally been isolated and not invested in to bring all those utilities onto the plant floor network. So you have one large network of industrial automation that includes your production, packaging, and all of your secondary utilities. So I think that's going to be key in the future. Great tip, Shiva. What would be your final piece of advice? I think having a sustainability plan is important. And the sustainability plan needs to include how in an organization, we are going to implement this and how we are going to pay for it. I think putting the live right kind of leadership around it is going to ensure that we can get on that sustainability journey. I think that would be my. Well, I often describe to my audience and really anyone that asks, "Banufacturing Happy Hours" is really a leadership podcast disguised as a manufacturing podcast. So I appreciate you doubling down on the stakeholders and the leadership that you need around this to make these projects a reality. Eric, Shiva, thanks so much today for jumping on manufacturing Happy Hour and cheers to no spilled beer or at least finding a way to sustainably reuse it. Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks Chris. [Music] What a great overview. Whatever you're doing in manufacturing, it sounds like there's an opportunity for you related to what we talked about today as well. I also really like the idea of leading off with energy first and then production, quality improvements, throughput improvements, those coming second. You know, one thing I've seen in industry is there are a lot of folks, a lot of people on teams that are very much sustainability driven first and foremost. And I love hearing that mentality represented here in today's podcast episode. As always, if you want to learn more, if you want to connect with Shiva or Eric, make sure to go to the Shandows page at manufacturinghappyhours.com/261. And I want to give one final shout out, one final thank you to Rockwell Automation for making this recent solution series possible. We've been speaking with systems integrators. We've been speaking with engineering firms, really diving into what I would call behind the scenes on a lot of different projects, giving you some visibility to how manufacturers are solving problems, taking on new things like energy transition like we talked about today. So thank you Rockwell Automation for making this series possible. I also want to say I'm going to be at Automation Fair on November 17th through 20th, 2025. If you're listening to this episode right around the time it comes out, I'm going to be throwing a party there on Tuesday, November 18th. If you want to stay connected with manufacturing happy hour and learn about any of the events that we're throwing across the country, sign up for our newsletter by going to manufacturinghappyhour.com/party to be the first to learn about anything that we've got coming up. With that, stay innovative, stay thirsty, we'll catch you again real soon. Cheers!