It started out like a detective game. On a quiet Sunday in Stuttgart, Ulrich Funk and his small team decided to launch their search for energy-saving potential at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Stuttgart-Untertürkheim. Armed with pens and notepads, they spent the entire day going through the deserted production facility. “We identified a lot of savings potential,” says Funk. “The small things we noticed immediately included open windows, switched-on lights, and machines running for no apparent reason.”

That Sunday of detective work marked the beginning of a major energy-saving campaign. For several months, Funk and his team carefully studied the entire facility, whose buildings cover more than two million square meters and produce hundreds of thousands of engines, axles, and transmissions each year. “Over the first few weeks, we were able to reduce energy consumption at weekends by more than 25 percent,” says Funk, who back then headed the Energy Optimization project. Thomas Hübner, who has since taken over the project from Funk, says the successes already achieved will act as a motivation to further improve energy efficiency.

Daimler’s German plants are pioneers in environmental protection. Long before energy conservation became a big issue in the media, Daimler employees were already using clever and sophisticated concepts to eliminate tons of CO2 emissions. The secret of their success has been a combination of technical innovation and employee dedication. With this recipe, Daimler plants have already achieved energy savings totaling several hundred million kilowatt-hours, without having to interrupt operations. “And we’ve only just gotten started with the initiative – there are still plenty of ideas we haven’t even used yet,” says Horst Uhl.

Uhl is responsible for what he calls “energetic modernization” at Daimler’s EvoBus subsidiary in Ulm. This isn’t a top-down project; it’s being implemented on the initiative of employees. “Every day, our people see where energy can be saved at work,” says Uhl. By simply relying on messages posted on information boards and handing out thousands of flyers, he started a very successful competition for energy-saving ideas. “Everyone was really proud of how much we were able to accomplish,” he reports. Although the proposed steps were small, when taken together the potential was huge. One measure involved the doors at EvoBus factory hall entrances, which are nearly five meters (16 feet) high. Every time new doors were required, the old doors were replaced with fast-moving ones that open in just four seconds and close just as quickly. That keeps the cold air out, which saves a lot of heating energy in the winter. New systems installed in the paint shops at the Mercedes-Benz plants in Bremen and Rastatt have made the biggest contribution to energy conservation there. These systems transfer the hot air needed for the various paint drying cycles to a heat exchanger, thereby putting it to practical use. However, such noticeable successes require a lot of work behind the scenes.

Harald Weinert, the Energy Optimization project manager at the Mercedes Technology Center (MTC) in Sindelfingen, studied his facility’s electricity consumption with his team for several months. By placing more than 250 measuring devices in the MTC building and later meticulously examining the results, he created a detailed plan for saving energy. “In the beginning, I had no idea which machines were using how much electricity and when,” Weinert recalls. His precise analyses enabled him to improve the energy balance in a targeted manner using an approach that covered everything from turning off lights at night to optimizing climate control systems.

Such dedication to energy conservation at work is bound to rub off in private as well. “My family now jokes about how I always make sure windows are closed, the heat is set right, appliances are switched off rather than in the standby mode, and unneeded lights are turned off,” says Funk. Recently, his children jokingly yelled to each other in mock warning to “turn off the lights, Dad’s home,” when Funk returned from work. “Before my project at Daimler,” says Funk, “I never would have thought that conserving energy would become such a passion.”