Welcome back after the holidays and all the best for the New Year. As I mentioned in a previous column, Instrumentation and Control will be placing more emphasis this year on energy efficient systems and we kick off in January with a most interesting article ‘More bang for your buck’ by features editor, Andrew Ashton.
An annual increase in the unit cost of electricity of 33% over the next three years will probably put South Africa amongst the top three most expensive in the world. This will force manufacturers to put much more emphasis on energy savings if they wish to remain competitive. In November last year, Andrew and I had an opportunity to get together with local energy expert Fred Gibson of Gibson Technologies and Conrad Muller of Beckhoff Automation to brainstorm some ideas that we hope might help kick-start the process.
Fred made the point upfront that before any costly high-tech solutions be considered the organisation should first look at the basics – a great example for the KISS approach. Essentially, he says, there are only two ways to save on energy costs:
* Pay less per kWh.
* Use less power.
First and foremost management must find out what tariffs are available from the supplier and that they are being billed at the most favourable rate available. Also, there might be times of the day when tariffs are lower, for instance, outside the times of peak demand. Consider shifting production schedules to take advantage of this.
Once you are sure that everything has been done and that you are paying the cheapest possible rate, then re-examine your processes. Design and run your process efficiently. Consider options like running at full capacity for three hours and then switching off for the rest of the day, rather than running at part capacity for the full day.
At one point Fred took the meeting rather by surprise when he pointed out something that should be perfectly obvious, but had been overlooked by all of us: every bit of current leaking to earth is reflected in the monthly electricity bill. If you are serious about energy management you have got to monitor what is flowing to ground. (That KISS idea again.)
I have not even scratched the surface of the subject, but that is the purpose of the article. We wanted to identify some of the obvious things that could be done to empower those who are struggling to implement an energy management strategy, or even get the process started. Perhaps the first step is the realisation that an awareness of energy costs and energy consumption is something that everybody in an organisation needs to subscribe to.
Thank you Conrad and Fred for a most interesting meeting, we look forward to more in the future.
News flash
In order to give our electronic subscribers broader coverage of developments in the industry, we will be supplementing the monthly e-zine with a shorter version – the News flash. This will be sent about the middle of every month with the first one scheduled for January 22. We decided to do this in order to give a steadier supply of information throughout the year, and also because print costs are limiting our ability to cover everything we want to in the magazine. I hope you find it useful.
Steven Meyer, editor: SA Instrumentation & Control
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