How Danfoss uses electricity and efficiency to cut costs
We Mean Business Coalition
Engineering company Danfoss is embedding electrification and efficiency across its production site in Grodzisk, Poland — decarbonizing its facilities and saving energy and money in the process.
The site in Grodzisk, which creates components for indoor heating and cooling systems, comprises a newly built hall designed for near-zero emissions with older facilities that are continuously modernized.
The production halls demonstrate how industry can decarbonize in a competitive way, through the construction of new facilities or the retrofitting and modernization of existing ones, while also providing a roadmap to decarbonize Danfoss’s other factories.
Danfoss is one of over a dozen companies featured in We Mean Business Coalition’s Business Action Checklists, which offer guidance on what companies can do in the next two to five years to reduce reliance on fossil fuels.
How it works
Credit: Danfoss
When Danfoss expanded from two to three production halls, it designed its new Hall #3 with electrification and efficiency measures embedded from the start, reducing emissions while maintaining high productivity.
At the same time, it retrofitted older halls with modern technologies that reduce energy use and costs, implemented quickly to avoid disruption to production. As Danfoss showed, moves like this require little to no investment in new technologies yet bring substantial energy and economic savings.
The moves are rooted in electricity and efficiency.
Electricity
Danfoss added heat pumps and electric boilers across its production sites to provide flexible heating and cooling — a move that cuts gas use and stabilizes energy costs. Electric heat pumps are also highly efficient: One heat pump can generate 380 kW of heat power output from only 100 kW of electric power input.
Because heat pumps are reversible, the system can automatically switch between different sources to work as efficiently as possible, depending on the outside temperature and heat demand.
Danfoss also installed electric boilers to operate in the winter months, when heat demand is greatest. This means the factory can decrease its costs from heating with natural gas, as well as its dependence on volatile fossil fuel markets.
Efficiency
To boost efficiency, Danfoss powered down idle machines as part of its “Shutting Off Initiative.” Through its standard practice to keep large machines on standby when not in use, Danfoss showed that 80% of the machines could be switched off, with no effect on productivity. Doing so saved the Grodzisk campus over 4,600 kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy per day.
When implemented across its 101 factories, Danfoss expects to save about 80 million kWh annually — between 8% and 10% of its total energy usage — corresponding to €3–5 million saved.
Credit: Danfoss
Danfoss also retrofitted facilities with new and rebuilt air handling units that recover waste heat, reduce heating bills and provide cooling for a more comfortable workplace. Additionally, with variable speed drives, Danfoss optimized airflow and reduced fan energy use by up to 40%, saving energy and money.
It completed the retrofits in 10 days with minimal disruption; in 2023, these retrofits resulted in 1.8 million kWh saved in electricity and gas per year — equal to a savings of €420,000.
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Poland is one of the EU’s most industrialized economies, with over 20% of its GDP from industry, and is heavily reliant on fossil fuels. Danfoss’s pilots in Grodzisk highlight how even within such an economy, businesses can decarbonize while maintaining competitiveness.
For more examples of electrification and other clean and efficient technologies at work, see our Business Action Checklists.