Last month, we reported on GE’s largest single energy audit, called a “Treasure Hunt,” in which a team of 90 employees and contractors went on a three-day mission to ferret out energy inefficiencies at our plant in Wisconsin. A team at GE’s Global Research headquarters in Niskayuna, NY just went on their own hunt — this time with water in the crosshairs.


Water world: Teams of engineers, scientists, and water experts examined our Global Research Center’s water use to learn how GE can reduce, reuse, and recycle water. The Niskayuna, NY research site spends close to $600,000 per year on water alone. Here, Paul Siemers and Greg Boileau visually trace water piping for processes in the Metallurgy Building as part of the hunt.

Modeled after an energy-saving process developed by Toyota, the recent treasure hunt in Wisconsin identified $3 million in savings and a reduction of nearly 24,000 metric tons of CO2. Likewise, the team in New York, with the help of a Toyota expert from their “Energy Saving Treasure Hunt” team, went on what is called a “Kaizen blitz” to help determine where to take actions to reach GE’s ecomagination goal of reducing water use by 20% by 2012 compared to 2006 usage levels.

For those unfamiliar with the term, a Kaizen “blitz” can be broken down to mean a small continuous improvement that is attacked from all directions in a concentrated effort. At GE, we would call this a “Lean Action Workout.”

The blitz was a huge success and pointed out actions that Global Research could take to reduce water consumption annually by 45% from 2006 levels with a cost saving of $250,000 per year for water purchases and over $1.3 million per year when electricity savings are included. Many of these projects — approximately 80% — have payback periods of less then two years.

* Read “How GE’s ‘Treasure Hunts’ Discovered More Than $110M in Energy Savings”
* Watch a video of GE’s recent “treasure hunt” in Wisconsin
* Read “Hunting for energy treasures in Cincinnati”
* Read “Finding energy savings in unlikely places”
* See how we’re reducing GHG emissions across the company
* Learn more about our water research projects