Nissan North America, Inc.: Energy performance

Better Buildings, Better Plants Challenge partners strive to decrease portfolio-wide source energy use intensity (EUI) from a baseline year. Nissan North America's portfolio consists of three manufacturing sites. Their energy management activities are part of the company's corporate strategy to drive more efficient and sustainable mobility with the aim of achieving carbon neutrality through innovation, electrification and evolving battery technologies.

Nissan works to ensure each facility contributes to its goal of efficient and sustainable mobility. 
*Canton Vehicle Assembly Plant: Through benchmarking and implementation of air handling equipment and chilled water system optimization, Canton plant leads the charge in energy performance improvement.  
*Smyrna Vehicle Assembly Plant & Decherd Powertrain Operations: Both plants will see capital investments to replace aged facility equipment, including chillers and air compressors. Decherd is trialing a new compressed air control system that analyzes demand-side conditions to improve supply-side operations.  
*Cross-site: Regionally, Nissan has utilized internal communication campaigns and energy treasure hunts to foster a culture of energy efficiency. Alongside those activities, compressed air brigades are utilized to continuously search for and repair compressed air leaks.

Looking at the percent improvement in energy performance across all facilities can provide insight into how an organization is saving energy. Each Nissan plant has its energy intensity metric described as source energy per unit of output, with each plant producing a different product. These outputs include the number of vehicles, engines, powertrains, castings and forgings produced. The absolute change and percent change in source energy use, production output and energy intensity are tracked for each facility monthly and annually. These metrics build 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.

Better Plants Water Savings partners strive to decrease portfolio-wide water use intensity (WUI) and increase the percent improvement compared to a set baseline. Nissan's portfolio consists of three manufacturing sites. Nissan has achieved a water intensity improvement of 1.3% since its baseline year of 2014. Nissan's water-use intensity improvement has been driven by new efforts to reuse water, new filtration efforts in its paint shops, and improved employee engagement.