1 of 5 Posts……/ on why energy efficiency is not implemented in restaurants.
I was having breakfast in a chic restaurant in Tampa, Florida ceramic plates clinking as the server set the table for five of us, on a cool winter morning in 2019. One of the guests was the funder in our large school district energy saving project, after shaking hands he asked me, straight, what was my personal carbon reduction goal.
I responded that my goal was to reduce 1 million tons a year. Which it had been since 2012 when I started working in a large copper mining project in South Africa.
But I wasn’t ready for his response, “Commit to reduce 1 billion tons of carbon a year or go home”.
I was shocked, that was 100,000 MW of power equivalent. An improbable goal. To cut a long story short, after a few weeks of soul searching I committed to myself that I would go for a 1 billion ton carbon reduction goal, and part of that would be to bring world best practice energy efficiency to restaurants.
And it all started in a KFC in Durban, South Africa.
And I thought restaurant kitchens would be pretty straight forward work places.
I thought having had worked in the control systems of coal fired power stations, copper, iron, platinum and titanium processing plants smelters, a restaurant kitchen can’t be that difficult to understand.
I was wrong.
I felt very embarrassed. I couldn’t explain how the energy was being used over the 14 hours that the restaurant was opened.
Wow…. as I discovered, which humbled me, is that restaurant kitchens are very complex…
I had previously developed an energy design process for resorts, shopping centres, industry and mining but would it work for a restaurant kitchen.
My energy process includes understanding energy use of the equipment under study, their design capacity, limitations, constraints, production equipment capacity factors. And after watching the busy kitchen staff deal with time sensitive orders and going from quiet to bustling in 5 minutes.
I got to see that the overriding need for the kitchen staff is to consistently produce quality food. And to be able to do this when orders are overflowing out of the Kitchen Display System quickly opened my eyes to a very complex production system.
So energy efficiency has to be built into the equipment, it can’t be left to staff, they are too busy and have too many things to do. The 50% energy waste in built into the equipment.. period.
This is Part 1 of 5: Why 50% of Restaurant Energy Goes Down the Drain Next: Unpacking the Chaos: The Hidden Layers of Restaurant Operations That Sabotage Your Energy Bills
Restaurant owners and Managing Directors —what are your “biggest energy users in your restaurants“? Drop it below or DM me. I’m giving away my full energy analysis blueprint to track actual energy use.
#KitchenEnergySavings #EnergyEfficiency #HospitalityProfits #SustainableOperations
