Alcoa Corporation: Energy performance

Better Buildings, Better Plants Challenge partners strive to decrease portfolio-wide source energy use intensity (EUI), from a baseline year. Alcoa's portfolio consists of 27 plants within six different business units as of 2015. Alcoa's enterprise-wide energy reduction initiative includes a requirement for energy efficiency to be considered on all large projects. Recently, Alcoa began to link leadership pay to achievement of energy efficiency targets. Best practice scorecards are used at many plants to evaluate the potential for improvement in energy-consuming systems such as compressed air and process heating. 

Looking at the percent improvement in energy performance across all facilities can provide insight into how an organization is saving energy. Alcoa has achieved energy performance improvement of over 10% at more than 20% of its facilities. There are still a significant number of facilities that have experienced an increase in energy intensity, meaning they are consuming more energy for each unit of product produced than they were in their baseline year. By targeting these facilities for energy efficiency improvements, Alcoa can continue to make progress toward its corporate-wide commitment. 

Each Alcoa business unit consists of several manufacturing plants producing similar types of products. Each of the plants within each business unit has an energy intensity metric (source energy per unit of output) most suitable for its type of operation. The output includes metric tons, revenue, number of molds cast, number of pieces shipped, and sales. The absolute change and percent change in source energy use, production output, and energy intensity are tracked for each plant on both a monthly and annual basis. Alcoa employs regression analysis to normalize for weather and production as appropriate for all plants. Plant metrics are rolled up to the corporate level, with a corporate-wide percent improvement in energy intensity calculated by taking a weighted average of the percent change in energy intensity at the individual facilities.