Waste Heat Recovery - first European industry project certified by the Investor Confidence Project

Waste Heat Recovery - first European industry project certified by the Investor Confidence Project

VIENNA/LONDON, January 2019. The Investor Confidence Project's innovative Investor Ready Energy Efficiency™ Certification has been awarded to a waste heat utilisation project at GMS GOURMET GmbH. The project uses waste heat of two fast cooling plants to support the heating demand of three ventilation systems at GOURMET's production site in Vienna and thereby saves natural gas and electricity.

"Managing Director Hannes Hasibar emphasizes GOURMET's leadership when it comes to energy efficiency and innovation: "As a responsible company we treat the earth's natural resources with care and continuously work on improving efficiency and standards."

GOURMET's appetite for innovation goes hand in hand with ICP Europe's new Investor Ready Energy Efficiency (IREETM) Certification for industry which delivers high quality projects and safer returns by standardizing how energy efficiency projects are developed, documented and measured.

Convinced of the benefits of ICP, energy efficiency specialist denkstatt & enertec became the first registered ICP project developer for industry projects and - together with Austrian ICP partner denkstatt - accompanied GOURMET to have its waste heat recovery project certified as the first industrial project in Europe.

"Managing Director Christian Schuetzenhofer: "The application of ICP through denkstatt & enertec gives the project owner even more robust, independently verified savings calculations and an additional level of quality assurance. Moreover, it puts more focus on proper project implementation in addition to project development."

The project has predicted annual energy savings of 635 MWh in natural gas and 135 MWh in electricity. As project developer, denkstatt & enertec provided the underlying baselining and energy savings calculations and developed implementation plans for Operational Performance Verification (OPV), Operations, Maintenance & Monitoring (OM&M) and Measurement & Verification (M&V) processes. Working closely with denkstatt & enertec, the project's quality assurance assessor and technical ICP partner Verco applied the ICP Europe Complex Industry Protocol to certify the project.

ICP framework is now also available in German and ready to deliver high-quality projects

"ICP Europe Senior Advisor Steve Fawkes: "The ICP framework assembles best practices and existing technical standards into a set of Protocols that define a clear roadmap for developing projects, determining savings estimates, and documenting and verifying results. GOURMET's IREE-certified project shows that our framework - which has been successfully applied to multiple buildings projects in the past - also delivers high-quality industrial projects that the project owner can bank on."

The ICP Protocols and accompanying tools and templates are published as open-source documents (http://europe.eeperformance.org/protocols.html) ready to be used in energy efficiency projects in industry & energy supply and street lighting projects across Europe. Since November, the Protocols are also available in German to facilitate the application of ICP in Austria and Germany. Free online trainings for interested project developers and quality assurance assessors are regularly offered.

"Willibald Kaltenbrunner, Managing Partner of Austrian ICP partner denkstatt: "This project's insights show that the additional benefit of applying ICP usually outweighs any additional effort that is needed. We hope to see more businesses following GOURMET's pioneering role and are happy to support Austrian project owners and developers working on high-quality industrial energy efficiency projects. "