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By Rod Ellsworth
When you buy a new piece of equipment, do you factor energy efficiency into your total lifecycle costs? If you do, you're going to have to understand what your current equipment is consuming in terms of energy. The thought process has to be integrated into how facilities are maintained and operated from now on.
As an example, we've done some audits lately of manufacturing operations, and a particular manufacturer had a 100HP motor out on their plant floor. That type of motor normally costs $10,000, according to their procurement agent, and it was designed at a certain percent efficiency—in this case, 94 percent.
That $10,000 motor, over its life expectancy, was operating 40,000 hours. After 40,000 hours, they say there is degradation in the motors and you probably should replace it—if you adhere to the OEM recommendation. Over the course of that 40,000 hours—and that's five years—the question I asked this manufacturer is, 'do you have any idea of how much energy that motor is consuming?' And the answer was 'no.' They said 'my job is to maintain that asset, because I want to extend the life of it as long as possible.' So I shared with them that, if they were paying about 10 cents/kwh, that $10,000 motor would cost over $300,000 in energy over a five year life expectancy—and that's if it were running at 94 percent energy efficiency. So the bad news was, we tested it, and that motor was running at less than 50 percent energy efficiency, and that was going to cost them over $600,000 a year to run that one motor.
Here was the issue: they never would have known that unless you can measure the amount of energy being consumed by that specific piece of equipment. You can't manage what you don't measure—so we measure the energy consumption, along with the other information, on a piece of equipment, and then we proactively go out and maintain that for peak energy efficiency, as well as peak OEE.
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