Company Announcement - Meadow Feeds has embarked on a journey to remain a globally competitive animal feed company by implementing greener business practices that not only make financial business sense, but most importantly considers the environmental impact. The first step towards achieving this was to install smart metering and implementing an energy efficiency lighting retrofit project that delivered real value to the production facility whilst cutting energy costs.

Regarded as market leaders in the animal feed industry in southern Africa, the company produces a variety of specialised diets and custom feed mixes for the poultry, dairy, ostrich and swine industries. Meadow's historical and continued success is driven by ensuring nutritional supremacy and the consistency of supplying quality animal feeds and nutritional solutions. Therefore, the quality and standard of lighting could not be compromised, which was the mandate from Meadow Feeds to the energy engineering solutions consultants on the project, Energy Cybernetics, an EOH company.

Meadow Feeds contracted Energy Cybernetics to develop and implement an energy efficiency lighting project at their feed manufacturing facility in Randfontein. The project qualified for partial funding through the Eskom Standard Product Programme.  In terms of the SPP, Eskom refunds a client part of the cost of an energy efficiency project, based on the energy (kWh) and demand savings that the project achieves. For this project, the Eskom rebate was just under 25% of the total project cost. Although energy efficient lighting projects are considered as low hanging fruit, it is recognised as the quickest, most cost-effective and least intrusive energy saving intervention. With plants that operate 24/7, lighting retrofits cause minimum disruption to day-to-day operations. In addition, many proven energy efficient lighting technologies are now available, which guarantees quality and expected energy savings thereby reducing the risk of the project investment. Eskom requires that savings need to be substantiated through the use of a spreadsheet, or tool, that calculates the project impact as well as the rebate that Eskom would pay to the client on successful project completion. This tool was developed by Eskom and has been used in many projects. The validity of the tool is not at issue, as Eskom is prepared to pay out substantial rebate amounts to customers based on the outputs from the spreadsheet.

However, since Meadow Feeds has had very little prior experience with either energy efficiency projects or with Eskom’s SPP, the client required measurement of the project impact to support or validate the Eskom SPP tool, purely as an internal control for the project and to motivate further investments in energy efficient projects within the group. Energy Cybernetics installed PowerWatch, its in-house developed smart metering system on the incomer at Meadow Feeds which measured the consumption of the entire Randfontein site. Besides providing overall reporting and monitoring of the plant’s energy use, PowerWatch allowed the corroboration of savings recorded by the Eskom tool. PowerWatch measures consumption data at a high frequency and can report amongst others energy consumption, demand, reactive energy and power factor information at intervals from 5 to 60 minutes.
The project’s financial impact as calculated by the SPP toolkit amounts to R314 000 per annum.  Given that the demand impact was evaluated with PowerWatch, this saving can be treated with a high degree of confidence as the credibility of the Eskom Toolkit was evaluated with PowerWatch data and resulted in only a 1,3 kW difference. The return of investment for Meadow Feeds is 18 months.

But did less energy use for lighting mean a compromise on the quality of light? The average lux levels were measured in various areas of the plant, both before and after project implementation. On average, lux levels increased by 46% for all areas. Embarking on projects of this nature, even if it is considered low hanging fruit, still not only saves energy and money, the Meadow Feeds energy efficient lighting retrofit has shown a significant increase in light quality as well - not only through better technology, but reviewing the lighting system holistically and improving on it to ensure long-term optimal use.
Energy Cybernetics offers a three-year warranty that assures the energy efficient lighting retrofit projects sustain their energy savings as well as the required lux levels.