Emerson announces Smart Energy initiative

Emerson Process Management's Smart Energy initiative, which was announced at Emerson Exchange 2011 in Nashville, USA, is a global program designed to combine industrial energy expertise with advanced energy management technologies to enable customers to leverage more renewable fuels, lower energy costs, and reduce emissions.

With the initiative, Emerson is looking to tap an estimated US$2 billion market that is poised for strong growth as refineries, manufacturers, and other industrial customers face increased pressure to adopt lower-cost fuels.

“With industrial manufacturers consuming an estimated 50 percent of the world's energy, combined with rising fossil fuel prices and global mandates for reduced emissions, our customers need more than incremental efficiencies in energy management,” said Steve Sonnenberg, president of Emerson Process Management. “With our Smart Energy Initiative, Emerson is introducing a fundamentally new platform that can change energy economics globally.”

“We have seen tremendous growth for certain projects, such as biomass-to-energy conversion, where we have many customers running on renewable fuels 95 percent of the time,” Sonnenberg added. “Given our track record and energy management leadership, we anticipate 25 percent to 35 percent growth in industrial energy projects over the next five years.”

Heading up Emerson's new Industrial Energy Group is Chip Rennie, who noted that improving energy efficiency at a customer site by just one to two percent can translate into hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings, and substituting a waste fuel for a purchased fuel can save millions of dollars annually.