Toyota’s Kentucky paint shop wins DOE Better Project Award for cutting fresh-air energy use

Toyota’s Kentucky manufacturing team has won the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2026 Better Project Award for energy savings tied to paint-shop ventilation upgrades at the automaker’s Georgetown, Kentucky facility. The award recognizes projects at individual industrial sites that implement measurable improvements in areas such as energy efficiency, water use, and waste reduction, as part of DOE’s Better Buildings and Better Plants Initiative.

At the heart of the project is a Fresh Air Supply House (FASH), a ventilation component that supplies air used during paint booth operations. Toyota said its production engineering team reduced the flow of outside air entering the FASH by more than 55 percent by redesigning the system to use building air instead of relying on fully outside air.

Toyota tied that ventilation change to operating economics, saying the redesigned paint booth setup reduced annual paint booth energy costs by more than 80 percent. Paint booths require maintaining stable conditions while coatings are applied and processed, and the company’s announcement frames the ventilation redesign as a way to cut the energy required to condition large volumes of outside air.

Before the redesign, Toyota said the FASH on Line 1 at the Kentucky plant used 100 percent outside air for processing and did not have a pathway to reduce outside-air intake. In the new design, Toyota said the total amount of outside air that must be processed was reduced, with “pre-tempered” inside air used to help maintain building temperature stability while paint operations continue.

Toyota said the plant processes nearly 250,000 vehicles each year, creating sustained demand for paint operations that must be temperature-controlled. By using pre-tempered inside air and reducing the outside-air fraction that needed treatment, the company said it reduced energy demand while maintaining stable temperatures during processing.

The company linked the project to its Environmental Challenge 2050, describing the effort as aligned with reducing operational electric and natural gas usage. Tim Hilgeman, Toyota’s general manager of environmental sustainability, called the FASH project an example of production-engineering innovation in North America that produced tangible environmental and operational impact.

Toyota also said paint shops have been designated as a major focus area for energy-reduction efforts, with environmental and production engineering teams coordinating on the redesign. Adam Suleiman, a Toyota Kentucky production engineer and project lead, said the team integrated both energy and cost savings into the FASH changes through work with environmental engineering.

DOE’s Better Project Awards, as described by the initiative, are intended to highlight “outstanding accomplishments at individual facilities” implementing energy, water, and/or waste-saving measures. While Toyota’s announcement emphasizes the ventilation and operating cost outcomes, it does not provide details on the specific engineering configuration changes beyond the outside-air reduction and the switch to using building air and pre-tempered inside air.

Still, Toyota did not disclose several items that would help quantify the full performance picture, including the project’s implementation timeline, upfront capital cost, the measured measurement period for energy cost reductions, or the exact equipment modifications behind the redesign. What is clear is that the initiative’s payoff was large enough for DOE to single out the Georgetown paint-shop project as a 2026 Better Project Award winner.

Looking ahead, Toyota’s next steps likely involve spreading similar energy-management approaches across other high-energy operations within manufacturing plants. The award also adds to a broader pattern in industrial efficiency programs where ventilation and building systems are targeted for major energy savings, especially when those systems support continuous processes like vehicle painting.