Technical Maintenance & Facility Management

The Photonis Group, a high-tech group that designs and manufacturers electro-optic components and precision sensors, signed a 10-year energy performance contract (EPC) that started in August of this year. The contract was won on the basis of a pooled VINCI Facilities & Actemium bid.

Emmanuel Nunes, Business Unit Manager at VINCI Facilities FM Aquitaine (France), discusses the 100% VINCI Energies success.

How did the Photonis project start?

VINCI Facilities FM Aquitaine had bid on a Photonis tender for a three-year Facility Management contract at the company’s industrial site in Brive La Gaillarde. We won the contract hands down.

Meanwhile, we learned that the customer wanted to undertake a broad-based energy savings programme. The target was to achieve energy savings of 13%.

This was an opportunity to suggest that Photonis add an Energy Performance Contract to the existing FM contract, to be carried out in synergy by the VINCI Energies teams.
We rapidly positioned ourselves by bringing our Actemium counterparts on board.

Why did you call on Actemium Bordeaux Process?

This is not the first time we have partnered with Actemium Bordeaux Process. This is in fact the second contract we have won together, after Mondelez. So it is a winning long term tandem!

We decided to again join forces on this project, as soon as the tender file was put together, in order to have more impact with the customer.
And it worked: we won the contract with VINCI Facilities as the lead company and Actemium in charge of the design-works phase.

What are the main steps you will be taking under this EPC?

The first step was to analyse the customer’s requirements through on-site identification of the items that consume the most energy. To do this, we used the Quickscan systemic audit tailored to industrial site issues.

Quickscan enabled us to “scanW the Photonis equipment fleet in two days and to collect all the information needed to capture and recover unavoidable heat and inject it back into the industrial process.

We then needed to validate the ESC preliminary project by generating Energy Performance Actions covering all site requirements.

With the equipment we selected, we identified three effective actions:

1. Replacing the refrigeration system to ensure its proper operation over the coming 15 to 20-year period, with redundancy;

2. Eliminating the cooling tower that produced cycled water to directly use the new refrigeration system; this reduces the consumption of water to operate the tower;

3. Producing heat with new-generation condensing boilers, where we also looked for potential energy savings.

What conclusions do you draw from this experience?

It is too early to quantify the savings – it is generally necessary to wait for one year following the start of an EPC to obtain concrete results. But we have full confidence in this innovative model, which has proven itself in the past.

The customer is highly satisfied with the technical capabilities we brought to the project. This supports our commercial approach, which includes energy efficiency and the expertise of VINCI ENERGIES business units, demonstrating that real success are the success we share.