Use of average electricity cost can be misleading when assessing financial impact of energy efficiency measures. What counts is the cost of the last kWh comprised of Global Adjustment (Ontario), demand charges and energy cost. If average cost per kWh is used during project approval, it may become a challenge to show savings to [...]
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 [...]
Performance of every piece of machinery degraded with time. This may cost your plant thousands of dollars in lost production, rejects, and energy. Recommissioning can solve this problem, but it costs time and money. When is recommissioning worth the effort? Energy costs of performance degradation Degradation may be caused by a wide range of [...]
Automatic data collection, purposeful analysis and alert on deviations to appropriate people is a key to sustained energy cost savings.
Companies that buy new equipment to avoid Global Adjustment charges face risk of having stranded assets. Business case for investments in GA avoidance equipment - generators and batteries - relies on current GA model, which resulted from a political decision. GA regime is based on politics, which are reliably unreliable As we all know, [...]
I can't say how much energy your freezer wastes. I do not have a crystal ball, but we saw a few freezers at other companies and I have condensed our observations in a short mock Q&A with a plant manager: Q. Might our freezers work at their best efficiency? A. Yes, it is possible. [...]
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 [...]
If your plant is not a spacecraft, you cannot afford to maintain all machinery in perfect condition and run it in the most efficient mode all the time - performance degrades, operators change, procedures get forgotten or changed, production conditions change. On the other hand, when not timely corrected, small oversights and changes tend [...]
It occurred to me that meters relate to energy monitoring in the same way as screws relate to birdhouses. How is that? Some manufacturing plants start energy management from installation of meters. Too often the process ends with meters too. However costly, this result is predictable. I will explain why on an example of [...]
