The single most intensive user of electricity in an institutional facility, such as a school or hospital, is the kitchen. This is especially true of a kitchen in which most of the appliances are electric. An expensive but worthwhile project is to convert an all-electric kitchen to gas. Natural gas appliances are cleaner, more efficient, and cheaper to operate.
Short of a major retrofit, however, there are many routines the kitchen staff of an all-electric kitchen can do to save energy. Cooking with lids on the pots and pans is a good start. If the covers are tight-fitting, they hold some pressure in the container, and the liquid within boils sooner and with less energy. Using lids also keeps steam from increasing the humidity in the kitchen. High humidity increases the latent load on the air-conditioning system, which is a significant portion of the total load on the HVAC equipment.
Another effective procedure is to use exhaust hoods only when cooking. These hoods draw copious quantities of air from a room—many room volumes per hour. This room air has already been tempered, and the energy spent doing so is lost when the volume is exhausted to the atmosphere.
Other policies reduce the heat generated in the kitchen, and thus the energy needed to cool the space into the comfort zone. These include turning off food warmers when not in use, preheating the oven for baked goods only, directing cooling fans at people—away from cooking surfaces—and using microwaves for after-hours cooking of small quantities. Such procedures not only cause less waste heat to be released into the air-conditioned space but also lower the energy needed to do the cooking itself.
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Excerpted from Going Green, available as an eBook at this list of eBook retailers online.