Your industrial operation is constantly facing rising costs. Almost all the costs you face keep going up. Wages rise, rent increases, and your equipment gets more expensive.
However, there’s one place where you have the potential to actually reduce your costs: energy use. Each year, industries spend about $75 billion dollars buying energy. Reducing energy consumption can make your manufacturing or other industrial operation more efficient and profitable.
Here are some tips to cut your energy consumption.
As long as saving energy remains low on your priority list, you will never actually get around to saving energy. You need to make energy saving a priority for your industrial facility.
Concrete steps that will help you put energy saving on your priority list:
This type of energy policy process will ensure your industrial facility not only reduces energy consumption now, but also has a process for continual reduction of energy usage.
Energy saving is easier when it’s a team effort. If you can get your employees to support energy saving efforts, you will be more successful at achieving your goals.
Help everyone to understand what’s at stake with energy saving: “The less we spend on energy, the more money we have available for salaries, bonuses, perks, etc.” If possible, build in rewards for hitting energy saving targets.
Running machines accounts for an average of 52% of manufacturing energy consumption. This means that evaluating the efficiency of your machinery should be your first target for reducing energy costs.
Evaluate your machines to determine which ones will benefit from more regular maintenance to maintain efficiency. Then determine what machines need repairs to restore efficient operation. Finally, figure out which machines are too inefficient to continue operating and should be replaced with more efficient models.
Many industrial processes have different energy consumption related to some stages of the process. These stages depend on machines that consume large amounts of energy, which can make them very expensive to run.
You can save money even without reducing energy consumption by scheduling your process to take advantage of periods where energy is less expensive. As more of the grid switches to solar power, daytime energy prices can drop substantially. Check your local rates to see when it’s least expensive to use your biggest energy-consuming machines.
Having a machine running when you’re not using it can be a big waste of energy. Evaluate the shutdown and startup processes for all machines to determine the minimum idle period when shutting down and restarting makes sense. Then encourage employees to shut down machines whenever they would meet or exceed that idle period.
Lighting is a relatively small fraction of manufacturing energy use – just 6%. However, it’s one of the places where you can easily save energy without sacrificing benefit. You can get lighting that’s just as good (and sometimes better) with less energy consumption by replacing inefficient lighting.
HVAC is one of the largest energy consumers in your facility. It’s also one that is likely full of waste. One of the biggest opportunities for cutting energy consumption is replacing mechanical chillers with evaporative cooling. Evaporative cooling uses about 25% as much energy as mechanical cooling. There are few categories of energy consumption where you can take a 75% bite out of your energy consumption. This makes evaporative cooling a good place to start when looking for energy saving opportunities.
Don’t forget to evaluate process cooling options to consider where evaporative cooling might help make this more efficient.
Evaporative cooling can make a big difference in your industrial facility’s energy consumption. When you are looking for industrial evaporative cooling pads, choose Kuul. Our evaporative cooling pads are highly efficient at cooling and reduce strain on evaporative cooling fans. This not only helps reduce your energy consumption, but it can also extend the life of fans and motors.
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