Energy bills tell too little and come too late to act
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 too little - it's water [...]
5 simple steps to decide if it’s time to recommission
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 factors, such as wear and [...]
Energy submetering by itself is useless and how to make it work
Automatic data collection, purposeful analysis and alert on deviations to appropriate people is a key to sustained energy cost savings.
Why Global Adjustment avoidance assets may turn into stranded assets and how to avoid this
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, political decisions tend to change, [...]
How much energy your freezer wastes?
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. Q. Have you seen this [...]
5 golden rules of energy data analysis
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 use analysis. [...]
Unwatched energy efficiency costs dearly and what to do about it
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 to grow into massive energy [...]