Energy Use & Conservation
Manufacturing our products into finished packaged goods and maintaining our highest standards of safety, quality, and sanitation, all while providing a comfortable and secure environment for our employees to work, can consume significant amounts of energy. In this type of interdependent environment, we know many opportunities exist to reduce energy consumption through operational optimization. Our scale provides us with a unique ability to test concepts at various facilities, learn, prove outcomes, and then implement successful energy-saving initiatives across our business.
We are on a journey of continuous improvement to identify our opportunities in this area and capitalize on them. ²ÝÝ®ÊÓƵ has set a goal to reduce energy intensity by 15 percent across our manufacturing facilities with a 2019 baseline. Our energy reduction strategy includes a variety of aspects such as advanced monitoring and the implementation of our good operating practice guidelines such as machinery upgrades, heat recovery projects, and improved condensate return.
Reduce energy use intensity by 15% across our manufacturing facilities by 2025 (per metric ton of product made).
-4.6%
2023 Progress
In 2023, we improved energy use intensity by 5 percent across our manufacturing facilities compared to our 2019 baseline. We continued to deploy utilities good operating practices and launched our global Energy and Utilities program across our sites. This program supports our factories in identifying technologies and systematic operational routines they can put into place to continuously improve their energy efficiency as well as their implementation prioritization based on projected energy savings.
Our Kitt Green facility in the United Kingdom is one of Europe’s largest food processing facilities. In 2023, the facility invested in an equipment and systems control upgrade to its cooling tower fans and pumps to improve energy efficiency, performance and reliability. The site’s cooling towers supply chlorinated cooling water to the production facility through a closed loop system that recovers condensate and is designed to reduce water loss. Cooling tower fans are essential in cooling the water that flows through this system, however, the fans at Kitt Green were consuming high amounts of energy, limiting airflow and had redundant power and control systems. To address these challenges, the facility implemented an equipment and controls improvement. In addition to installing more energy efficient equipment, the systems upgrade allows the onsite team to optimize utilization of different cooling fans and pumps based on required capacity at any given moment instead of running all continuously. As a result, the facility is projected to save approximately 1,698,000 kilowatt hours of electricity in 2024.
At our Nova Goias facility in Brazil, plant automatization standardization is anticipated to save 130,980 kilowatt hours of electricity per year. Completed in 2023, this standardization integrates functionalities from onsite hardware and software systems into one system, which allows the onsite team to better track and monitor energy use and performance. As a result, the technical site team can control the manufacturing lines’ energy and water efficiency, optimize shutdown procedures and centerlining based on consumption. This new way of working not only streamlines performance but also integrates an energy and water efficiency mindset into overall facility controls and makes proper use of energy and water responsibilities for everyone.
We are cognizant of the road ahead as we strive to achieve our energy use intensity goal. In 2022, the combination of acquisitions and divestitures passed our 5 percent materiality threshold and required us to adjust our baseline for this goal. Re-baselining our sites continues to have a negative impact on our progress to date and we are accelerating efforts to come close to or achieve our goal of reducing energy use intensity by 15 percent by 2025.
Looking Ahead
We continue to roll out a robust energy reduction roadmap in line with our global net zero strategy. In 2024, we will continue to focus on deploying activities aligned with the three KHMS pillars that comprise our global energy and utilities program—the routines, capabilities, and technologies we are putting in place to strengthen essential energy performance across all facilities while also supporting innovative efforts to build the utilities of the future. Through the deployment of these three pillars, we are on a journey to standardize the routines and ways of working across our facilities, strengthen the ²ÝÝ®ÊÓƵ community of experts in utilities management, and continue to build our shared operations culture of energy and water reduction.
* Please note that environmental data for years between the base year (2019) and reporting year are not recalculated for acquisitions and divestitures as per our Basis of Reporting for ESG indicators.
