World’s leading cold storage company reduces Energy Intensity more than 30%

Enabled by Ndustrial, Lineage Logistics has avoided the equivalent of nearly 250,000 homes’ annual electricity use.

In just over 10 years, Lineage Logistics has become one of the world’s largest and most dynamic cold storage companies. They now handle over 150 billion pounds of food a year – and that comes with a big energy bill.

Since the company’s inception, Lineage has focused on reimagining the food logistics industry, including their approach to technology and energy management. Key to those efforts has been their partnership with Ndustrial^™.

“Ndustrial is one of our closest technology partners and is integral to our technology vision including our data, engineering and energy management strategies” says Eric Ristow, VP of Product Management at Lineage. “They help us ensure that our programs are running efficiently across the world.”

Production-first Energy Intensity

Lineage and Ndustrial have worked together over many years to refine not only the monitoring and analytics technology, but also the metrics used to measure performance at each facility and across the portfolio.

Over time, Energy Intensity has emerged as a key metric. Energy Intensity measures not just energy used, but the amount used per unit of production – in this case, per pound of food stored. That helps normalize the data despite an ever-changing baseline.

Critically, it also centers the company’s efficiency efforts on what’s most important: the safe storage and transportation of food. This mindset leads to initiatives that get to the very heart of Lineage’s operations, rather than peripheral loads. For example, space optimization has allowed them to pack more product into each warehouse, reducing the need for new capacity as the company grows.

A related KPI is Energy Cost Intensity (also called Throughput Energy Cost), which accounts for the timing of electricity use. This captures the effects of load shifting and demand response efforts that save money by avoiding peak times. One facility saves roughly $2,000 a month just by shifting one process to off-peak hours.

Of course, carbon emissions are a key metric as well. Reporting on carbon is key to Lineage’s net zero strategy, and it’s also important for their investors. In fact, one debt issuer offers a discount on their loan rate for meeting milestones that help reduce greenhouse gas emissions – which means their carbon accounting must be based on accessible, auditable data.

READ MORE ABOUT HOW NDUSTRIAL IS HELPING LINEAGE HERE