Texas Instruments goes lean to be green
The man in charge of TI's green building programs gets virtually the same e-mail every week. "Can TI install wind turbines in the parking lots and photovoltaic panels on buildings?" fellow employees ask.
"Not yet," replies Paul Westbrook, TI's director of Sustainable Development. "Wind and solar are great, but before we install them, let's make sure our existing buildings aren't wasting resources. It makes no sense to power inefficiency with solar and wind."While other companies make headlines for switching to renewable energy, our employees are quietly retrofitting TI buildings worldwide to use less water, chemicals, energy and electricity. Reducing energy use is more cost-effective, ensures a quicker return on investment, decreases environmental impacts and lasts longer.
Even better, the opportunities are "limitless," Westbrook said.
When people talk of cutting carbon emissions, they usually think of transportation: driving less or buying local. However, buildings cause a substantial amount of emissions. In the U.S., buildings consume 71 percent of all the electricity and 30 percent of raw materials.
As a whole, office, manufacturing, residential and retail buildings contribute about 40 percent of the nation's carbon emissions, according to the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC).
To address this environmental challenge, TI has committed to incorporate green building standards into all future construction. We use the USGBC's LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Building Rating System as TI's assessment and certification tool. LEED-NC (new construction) is appropriate for new buildings.
However, TI has far more existing structures than new ones. In 2007, we registered our first facility with the LEED-EB (existing buildings) rating system and plan to complete LEED-EB certification for our major worldwide sites by 2011.
Negawatts vs. megawatts
Environmental visionary Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute coined the term "negawatt" to account for electricity that need not be generated because of successful efficiency measures. Negawatts are environmentally superior to megawatts, he argues, because they reduce pollution and upstream resource use.
Lovins advised TI during the design of our Richardson, Texas, fabrication plant, the first LEED-NC Gold-certified semiconductor manufacturing building in the world. Using negawatt principles, TI launched a $5 million "resource efficiency fund" to strategically fund efficiency projects for existing buildings that promised to pay off quickly.
In one case, our German manufacturing plant invested about $200,000 to reuse the heat from water that had cooled manufacturing operations. That warm water is pumped into a coil in the building's fresh air system to warm incoming air, thus reducing the need for electric-powered heating. This process also provides free cooling to the water that will return to cool manufacturing equipment. The project will pay for itself in reduced energy use and cost in about a year.
In another case, we improved cooling towers atop one of our buildings. TI modified the fans to run at variable speeds that match weather conditions and internal load. As a result, the towers consume less energy.
Most resource reduction projects tend to pay off in one to three years – a far better return on investment than adding solar panels or erecting windmills, Westbrook said. In 2007 alone, TI invested $1.2 million in electricity efficiency efforts and recouped $1.4 million in negawatts – equivalent to installing 25 acres of solar panels but at a much lower cost. Similar gains were made in reducing water and chemical use.
Westbrook believes that TI will continue taking this practical approach to energy reduction. As energy costs rise, the payback on efficiency investments gets shorter. And as technology improves, efficiency will too.