Fostering Manufacturer Collaboration through the SEEA Industrial Coalition

Southeast manufacturers, utilities, and other stakeholders have partnered together to form the Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance (SEEA) Industrial Coalition. The SEEA Industrial Coalition effort was formed as a key outcome of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Industrial Technologies Program’s (ITP’s) regional summit to address energy efficiency in the manufacturing sector held at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in June 2008. SEEA holds quarterly stakeholder meetings to help deliver energy efficiency resources to manufacturers in the Southeast. The members have found great value in being able to leverage the existing successes and experiences of others in the region to drive energy efficiency implementation. The paper will highlight this Coalition model as demonstrating the benefits of real-time peer-to-peer regional exchange forums. In addition to information sharing, SEEA has offered its members a series of technology and resource-related webinar sessions to learn about support available outside of the SEEA network. SEEA has succeeded in uniting the manufacturing sector and corresponding stakeholders across the Southeast to promote opportunities, techniques, and resources for achieving energy savings. The paper will focus on capturing the value that cross-sector, peer-to-peer regional coalitions offer and the emerging prevalence of these groups as a model for industrial energy efficiency information sharing. The paper topic directly aligns with the Summer Study theme of Energy Productivity in Industry: Partners and Opportunities offering a best practice strategy that works by capitalizing on regions that have shared energy challenges and promotes replication of the model to capitalize on similar opportunities in other regions.