For SME energy users and multi-site businesses, energy is rarely ‘just another overhead’. It affects cost, margin, operational resilience and, increasingly, your decarbonisation plans too.
A good advisor should do more than procure and tender. They should help you make better decisions, reduce risk, and give you confidence that somebody is looking around corners on your behalf while giving you guidance on changes coming down the line.
Manufacturing Steam Decarbonisation EXEED
Decarbonise the system you need not the system you have.
That was the key lesson from a recent Exemplar Energy SEAI EXEED Stage 1 study for a large manufacturing energy user targeting the removal of natural gas from site by 2030.
Rather than simply replacing a 250 kW gas steam boiler with a like-for-like electric alternative, we went back to first principles: challenge the process, reduce the demand, fix the losses and only then size the replacement.
The result:
• 40% reduction in required steam capacity — from 250 kW to 150 kW
• 255,000 kWh/year of energy savings identified against a 450,000 kWh/year baseline
• 57% estimated reduction in steam-system energy consumption
• 37.8 tCO₂/year avoided
• A full site electrical upgrade avoided
• A modular 2 × 75 kW electric steam solution sized to actual process demand
• A staged pathway to ultimately remove steam from the site altogether
The study also highlighted an important reality: some of the biggest opportunities weren’t found in new technology.
They came from challenging legacy operating assumptions, repairing steam traps, improving insulation, returning condensate, reducing pressure and temperature, changing controls, and understanding how the process actually operates.
The principle is simple:
Establish what the process needs.
Reduce the demand.
Then choose and size the technology.
Electrification becomes a very different proposition when you stop designing around yesterday’s demand.
Please download more at the link below:
http://www.exemplarenergy.ie/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Exemplar_Steam_CaseStudy_Branded_V3.pdf
