MechChem Africa March 2017

As a side event to theAfrican Energy Indaba 2017,The National Cleaner Production Centre (NCPC-SA) hosted an Energy Efficiency Workshop in partnership with the Consumer Goods Council of South Africa (CGCSA) and the Chemical and Allied Industries Association (CAIA). MechChemAfrica’s Glynnis Koch attends and reports. Addressing industrial energy costs and availability

I n her capacity as executive director of the Southern African Association for Energy Efficiency (SAEE), Valerie Geen was chosen as Programme director and MC for the day. Geen is a former head of en- ergy at the NBI (National Business Initiative) and is now a projects expert with the United NationsIndustrialDevelopmentOrganisation (UNIDO). The panelists for the morning discussion consisted of: Alex Haw, general manager for corporate sustainability,Massmart; Crescent Mushwana, research group leader for Energy Systems,CSIREnergyCentre;DeidrePenfold, executive director, CAIA; Ndivhuho Raphulu, director, NCPC-SA; and Sisa Njikelana, en- ergy patron of the SA IEE project, former chair of the Independent Power Producers Association and the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee (Energy). Alf Hartzenburg, national project man- ager, SA Industrial Energy Efficiency Project, NCPC-SA, began proceedingswith a keynote address inwhich he noted that theNCPC-SA

must position itself as a ‘centre of excellence’, capable of being a source for producing ex- perts for various energy efficiency solutions as well as a of cleaner production systems and data in South Africa. Driving success is the harnessing of behavioural change, and developing mentors, interns and gradu- ate engineers, he said, citing examples of the work that has already been done in Mozambique, Myanmar, Mauritius (a tech- nical feasibility study for thermal plants), Germany and the USA. He also emphasised fostering women’s empowerment, saying thatmanyhave found, ingeneral, thatwomen are better at managing improvements in energy efficiency than men. Hartzenburgbelievesthatlifecycleassess- ments of companiesmust be fast-tracked and the monitoring and evaluation of companies must become more robust. Other challenges and opportunities include: intelligent biogas heating systems, smart power, storage tech- nologies and intelligent drive and control systems. Although there is a growing base of

An overview diagram of a typical biogas plant from the by presentation Sashay Ramdharee entitled:’ Energy Efficiency gains through biogas’. technical expertise among managers, he not- ed that there was no room for complacency in the NCPC-SA. Rather, he stated: “Wemust maintain a senseof responsibility andkeepup the good start that has beenmade in improv- ing energy efficiency inSouthAfrica.”Quoting Abraham Lincoln, he added: “We must rise with the occasion, think anew and act anew.” People have traditionally looked towards a specific technology to reduce electric- ity consumption in industrial applications, and, during one of her morning summaries Geen pointed out that the IEE project and

Case study presenter, Darryn McComb, photographed with panellists: Alex Haw; Valerie Geen; Crescent Mushwana; Deidre Penfold; Sisa Njikelana and Ndivhuho Raphulu.

26 ¦ MechChem Africa • March 2017