Effective Energy Management Strategy Made Easy with SMC

But the numerous ways in which businesses could save energy can sometimes create an overload of opportunity – leading to inaction rather than action.

Will presence-sensitive lighting save more energy than recycling production waste? Which has greater “green” credentials? Is it enough simply to increase the energy efficiency of production equipment, or should you be thinking further upstream and investigating renewable energy sources?

An energy management audit can help to answer all those questions and more, before you waste too much energy on wondering how to save energy.

Making inefficiency visible

One of the difficulties of saving energy is that energy inefficiencies are often invisible.

For example, industry research has shown that around 20% of compressed air in a production facility is lost through leakage. This not only wastes the energy used to produce the compressed air, but wastes still more through the reduced efficiency of the assets involved, which won’t be operating at their optimum.

None of these inefficiencies are immediately obvious. Yet addressing them would be a quick and simple way to save energy.

Adopting a monitoring and metering system, and taking advantage of the connected environment of smart manufacturing, can underpin this kind of energy management approach, by making otherwise invisible inefficiencies visible.

4 ways to save

When you are able to identify where your inefficiencies lie, they’re far easier to address. However, that’s not the only element of an effective energy management strategy.

SMC have identified four elements which should form the core of any energy management approach:

1. Production equipment efficiency as outlined above. Identifying the pneumatic products and control systems key to optimising the energy and resource input of your manufacturing operation

2. Energy usage. Assessing all aspects of energy usage in your manufacturing chain, and improving resource deployment through energy management studies and partner seminars

3. Change team thinking. Devise and implement routes to optimise new thinking and approaches to energy usage and resource deployment within your management, workforce and sales team

4. Embed energy management values. Build an understanding of your business’s energy management values, to ensure best practice and improved energy management and resource usage across all aspects of your manufacturing operation and engineering staff training.

A durable solution

With these core elements in place, SMC will work with a business to develop a durable solution to energy management challenges, with defined goals and the right team to achieve them.

This could, for example, cover energy usage across your site. By installing site metering to provide a breakdown of energy use, you will be able to control and monitor the energy consumption of key plant, to gain a greater understanding of how you are using energy. You can expect this to deliver a typical improvement in energy performance of 1-3%, saving up to £50,000 p.a.

Resource management may also come under scrutiny. By carrying out regular maintenance on a water filtration unit, for example, you could prevent loss of water to drains of the order of 3l/minute, and expect savings in water costs of up to £4,500 p.a.