To be effective energy management project must start with goals to be achieved, not tools and technologies available. Managing energy has no meaning if it does not contribute to what your plant is doing. However profitable a project is, if it does not contribute to production, quality or safety, it will always be assessed [...]
Simple payback is a misleading financial ratio. Conventional wisdom says that short payback is a sign of a better project. Wrong. The goal of an investment is not to get your money back, but to make invested money make more money with minimum risk. Simple payback does not even consider risk of not getting money [...]
Every time I hear somebody say "project saved $123,456" I look if person's nose has grown a bit. Obviously such person does not understand the first thing about savings: energy savings is consumption that did not happen, nobody can measure something that did not happened. Energy savings are never exact, always an estimate. Always. [...]
When a baseline built over a certain period has R2=95%, it means that baseline formula accurately predicts actual consumption in 95% of the time during this period. This does NOT mean that there were no changes during this period. The wrongly predicted 5% of data points may be measurement noise or data collection error [...]
Calculating energy savings results is like keeping a golf score. If you ever been on the green, understanding the meaning of CUSUM will come easy. Baseline - how machine is supposed to work or worked before retrofit - is a par. CUSUM - a cumulative sum of deviations from baseline - is a score. If [...]
If your plant underproduced today, you may be able to catch up with schedule by working overtime tomorrow. If you wasted energy today, it is gone forever. No effort tomorrow will help to recover it. Timely action is the key to stop waste before it became to big. Do you know how much energy [...]
Monthly electrical bill is as good for energy management as a summary of monthly bank statement is for financial management: too little of data to understand what happened and too late to act. Summary of bank statement shows balance of account: sum of deposits and sum of payments. If you have spent too much or received [...]
1. In metering we trust :) Data is only reliable if it has been collected through routine automatic metering, which has been validated. All claims like 'we always keep this operational schedule', 'compressor/boiler/light is off on weekend' or 'current never exceeds X Amp', all of them have exactly zero value to energy [...]
Situation Doing nothing is an investment decision too. Investment with a guaranteed return of nothing. Here is a common conversation at a manufacturing plant: Me: … Implementation will cost you $5K and save $15K within 12 months. Maintenance manager: So we save $10K? Not much for our plant. Besides, I do not make investment [...]
A prospect informed about a possible massive cost of compressed air leaks responded: “What leaks? I do not hear hissing noise from compressed air leaks on the floor.” Plant manufactures gravel. Production noise is deafening. To hear compressed air leak would be a disaster, not only for energy bill, but likely for the whole [...]
