Global Warming Prevention

In the past year, we improved our production lines and introduced equipment with better environmental performances as a part of our efforts to reduce CO2 emissions. In Japan, Yokogawa Group continued playing an active part in the "Team Minus 6%," “Cool Biz” and “Warm Biz” national environmental conservation campaigns. Among the group companies, major factories and offices also actively attended the local “Black Illumination” campaigns that encouraged people to switch off lights on the summer solstice day.

In fiscal year 2008, Yokogawa group companies’ CO2 emissions in Japan on a unit sales basis amounted to 10.4 t-CO2 per 100 million yen, a 60.1% decrease compared to fiscal year 1990.

Although factors such as the energy conservation activities, energy efficiency improvement in the new factories, and weather conditions positively contributed to the reduction of CO2 emissions, the reduction rate of unit-sales-basis CO2 emissions was counterbalanced by the decrease in total sales. Thus, compared to the previous year, it roughly leveled off.

Since March of 2009, an inverter equipment has been applied to continuously running (24 hours per day) air conditioning system in Yokogawa Manufacturing Kofu Factory.

It is expected that 1,000MWh (equivalent to 425t/yr CO2 emissions) energy can be saved per year since applying this inverter equipment.

This factory was put into production in 2007. The production environment requires that the indoor temperature and the indoor moisture must be maintained at a certain level. Since large quantities of energy are consumed by the air conditioners and their controllers, we targeted the air conditioning system as a part of our energy conservation activities.

The energy manager of Kofu factory studied the air conditioning system with regards to how the energy is consumed and what would be a good measure to save energy, and then decided to use inverters for better controlling the air conditioners. The energy manager and the factory engineers checked and adjusted the indoor air pressure (normally positive air pressure), temperature and moisture as well as the air cleanness, so that energy efficiency is optimized.

Now, Kofu factory considers introducing the Yokogawa "Econo-Pilot Series" product for automatically controlling the air conditioning system to optimize the system with the change of seasons (change of temperature and moisture) for a further achievement on energy conservation.

In Yokogawa Manufacturing Komine Factory, when upgrading the existing air conditioning system, a high efficient chiller system was installed. Thus, it is expected that 134MWh (equivalent to 57t /yr CO2 emissions) energy can be saved per year.

The previous air conditioning system was also a chiller system with a cooling tower for cooling the production facilities. Since the previous chiller system had been continuously running for 15 years, the risk of failure became greater. The energy manager of Komine factory discussed with the facility manufacturer and then decided to install a high efficient chiller system. From now on, further studies on saving energy and reducing power consumption will be continued to optimize the system by fine tuning to the change of seasons.

In Yokogawa Manufacturing Kofu Factory, a new environmental activity started from April, 2008 to check the power consumption of each manufacturing group every day according to the predefined monthly consumption plans. In the course of this activity, every single employee contributed the considerations and suggestions on how to reduce the power consumption. For an example, a proposal suggested to turn off the air conditioners 30 minutes before the end of the planned overtime work or an optimization of air conditioning. Through this activity, the power consumption has reduced by 3,700MWh (equivalent to 1,573t /yr CO2 emissions) compared with the previous year. In the future, the similar activity will be carried out for reducing the town-gas consumptions.

Yokogawa Manufacturing Kofu Factory actively participated the Green Curtain activity, which is one of Kofu city's global warming prevention activities. In the compound of Kofu factory, a 10-meter wall along the building was planted with bitter gourd seedlings. In the summer, this piece formed a large “green curtain” to protect the building from sun exposure. The indoor temperature of the rooms shaded by the big leaves and creepers from the sun exposure is about 2 degrees Celsius lower than other rooms. In the future, the green curtain will be expanded to reduce the power consumption by the air conditioning system.

Since 2007, Yokogawa has encouraged the employees to utilize a Household Eco-Account Book so that the employees' families may integrate the environmental consciousness in their daily lives to reduce CO2 emissions little by little. According to the questionnaires collected from those families, they became more conscientious about reducing power and gas consumptions when using the home appliances, for example, by powering off electrical appliances as long it is not used.

Since fiscal year 2006, 300 kWh/year of the power at Yokogawa Electric Headquarters building comes from “green power” certified by the Green Power Certification System.