Design and development of an Energy Efficiency Knowledge Center (EEKC)

Over the last two decades, the Industrial Assessment Center (IAC) at West Virginia University has worked with more than 500 small and medium sized manufacturing companies to identify energy and productivity saving opportunities. The savings, which keep adding up year after year, are appreciable but do not fully capture the potential impacts of the IAC Program. On average, the implementation rate of the recommendations has been only about 40%. This rate was expected to improve with the use of a knowledge center. Energy Efficiency Knowledge Center (EEKC) is a regional system which includes the development and deployment of technical resources to assist industrial facilities in energy assessment phases. It supports continuous improvement by incorporating the knowledge of IAC experts and the plant personnel. The EEKC provides information to clients on how to obtain baseline energy use for their specific energy systems using tools such as Quick Plant Energy Profiler (Quick PEP) by the US Department of Energy (DOE). It helps users to evaluate the energy efficiency measures during the pre-assessment and assessment phases. In this research, the IAC activities and tasks are studied and the steps to develop an online knowledge center are reviewed.