Ford Europe has been hard at work trying to curb energy consumption, putting its money where its mouth is in the form of a comprehensive €23 million investment since 2011 to pioneer new energy-saving techniques across the continent.
Happily, we can report that it’s worked; Ford Europe is on schedule to reduce its energy usage by 25 percent per car by next year, thanks to a combination of different eco-conscious changes. In numbers, that reduction equates to roughly 800 Gigawatt-hours per year, or enough to power a city of around 170,000 occupants.
Among the changes made by Ford Europe in pursuit of saving energy are LED lighting fixtures, of which some 25,000 have been installed around the world. Exhaust heat from painting booths is also being recovered for the first time, both to re-heat the booths and offset the heat produced by burners, and to feed into the district water heating system. Furthermore, Ford Europe has protocols in place to remotely adjust plant heating systems in different areas depending on whether they are in-use.
“Constantly finding new ways of saving natural resources is an important challenge for Ford, especially in an energy intensive industry such as car-making,” says Ford Europe Energy Management head Richard Douthwaite. “Recycling waste heat from factory paint ovens is just one of the creative ways we are reducing energy demand, helping us to improve the environmental impact of our manufacturing facilities around the world.”
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