Vanessa, Maren, Jan and Lukas are trainees at häwa. During the 3 years of their apprenticeship, the trainees pass through all administrative, manufacturing and warehousing departments and gain a complete overview of the company's business procedures. But what about energy management? "Somehow we didn't take this topic into account," says Maren, "we just pressed the button and the light turned on”. But for a power-intensive company such as the control cabinet manufacturer häwa, every kilowatt hour is important. For many years häwa has been installing solar collectors on the company roofs, which produce about 1 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year - that's as much as required for 400 single-family homes. "We have already achieved an impressive result," says Jan, "but we think there is still room for improvement.
So they formed the häwa energy scout team and organized two workshops in six months on the topics of climate change, greenhouse gases and raw material reserves. They concluded that the first thing to do was to replace the old neon tubes in the punch and bend shop and training workshop with LEDs. Therefore, they counted the lamps, marked them on the hall plans and measured light intensity, efficiency and energy consumption.
At the häwa site in Bad Wörishofen, which has already been converted to LEDs, they documented the amount of heat generated by the neon tubes compared to LEDs using thermal cameras. "We worked very hard on this," said Lukas, "because it's the only way to understand the context. The four trainees are now even allowed to present their results to the Chamber of Industry and Commerce in Ulm.
"I am very proud that we are training such committed young people," says Dr. Georg Härdtle, member of the häwa board of directors and responsible for energy management. "This is also a very important topic for us, as we have a growing number of customers who specifically ask, for example, for the C02 footprint of our company or a specific product and this is often a determining factor in the purchasing decision.”
The team of Energy Scouts is currently and in the coming months implementing many other projects. For example, the installation of presence sensors for light control, the coupling of ventilation systems to light switches, but above all the sensitization of employees to environmental issues.
For example, a common goal could be to produce control cabinets entirely from green electricity. "We still need 300,000 kilowatt hours per year to achieve this goal," said Dr. Härdtle," which would be possible with an additional 3,000 square meters of solar collectors. Would that be possible? "I am convinced that we can realize this in the medium term".
