How to reduce the energy cost in production today

1. Train your Energy Team with SMART objectives

The speed and the efficiency They are, currently, two key aspects in the industrial sector and production processes. However, both are more difficult to achieve than ever due to unpredictable system failures, uncontrolled overhead costs, and wasted energy. To achieve their production goals quickly and efficiently, manufacturers must align operational performance with a comprehensive energy strategy and have the right people carry it out. This can be done by establishing an energy team responsible for establishing and meet SMART energy management goals. The industrial metallurgical plant of TACSA managed to save €110,000 creating a dedicated energy team that sets, implements and constantly reviews your SMART energy goals.

2. Start monitoring and analyzing Energy consumption

Every piece of manufacturing equipment in your plant has enormous data value that can reveal low or no-cost measurements, eliminating wasted energy that drives your bills unnecessarily high. The installation of monitoring and analysis equipment energy in real time It will put you under full control of your energy consumption. In addition, they will benefit from the alerts that these monitoring and analysis tools provide, which can help prevent breakdowns in their equipment. Monitoring can also generate savings in consumption after hours, as happened to the TACSA metallurgical.

3. Switch to LED lighting

First it was advised to change fluorescent lighting for low consumption bulbs, and now it is recommended to switch to LEDs. This has caused very significant energy savings, up to 90%! This will make it impossible for your CFO or Manager to refute your proposal, right? Not only that, LED lighting also has additional benefits for your facility's work environment, providing higher quality lighting that increases safety and productivity.

4. Correct the contracted power

power factor refers to the relationship between real (active) power and apparent power flowing to an electrical load (for example, a packaging machine on your production floor). This factor measures the efficiency of your electrical consumption, when converting it into useful power, such as light, heat or mechanical movement in the case of a manufacturing plant. It is important for manufacturers to understand how a contracted power (contracted power factor) incorrectly adjusted can increase the energy bill of your installation. When a motor is running inefficiently, the kVA (apparent power) increases. This results in increased energy consumption that may not appear on your bill, which is typically measured in kW. Some marketers penalize customers whose contracted power is too low, making your energy bill unnecessarily high. For this reason, it is essential that you verify the contracted power with your supplier, especially if you have installed more efficient equipment or updated certain machines in recent years. In this way you can save up to 50%, simply by adjusting the contracted power, at no additional cost to you. As the utility market has become increasingly deregulated, industrial manufacturers in Europe can negotiate with multiple suppliers to help them get the best deal for energy costs in their production processes. But without the right information about the energy consumption profile of your facilities and processes, it can be difficult to achieve. Learn how an industrial manufacturing plant in Spain solved this information gap and achieved save more than €100,000 in the process: