How to save energy in the factory

With the higher and higher cost of energy especially the fuel cost is on the rise, any factories in the world are paying more attention to energy and resources optimization. The main factors for this obviously is due to the higher energy cost will reduce the profitability margin. It will translate to product price competitiveness among other competitors.

What are the energy consumptions by a factory?
Every system in the factory required energy to drive or to run. The system can be range from hot water, lighting, clean dry air (CDA), waste water treatment, ultra pure water (UPW), bulk gases supply, IT networks and manufacturing equipments.

It is believed that most of the power and utility consumption came from the equipments or systems that draw high energy such as water heater and furnaces. Both of these systems required to be maintained high temperature due to the manufacturing process requirements.

In order to identify potential energy saving, it is not just look at those equipments that draw high power only but also the supporting equipments such as turbo pumps, vacuum systems, lasers and so on. All the supporting components can be drawing substantial energy as well.

How can the energy consumption be reduced?

From the factory point of view, energy savings can be done in the following two ways:

1. Within the facility and infrastructure system
Facility systems can be term as pillar to the factory. Facility systems is supplying all the gases, electricity, water, exhaust to the production floor. If anyone of the facility system is down, the production floor will be halt. Multi million dollars will be lost due to non-production. There is nothing new to reduce the energy consumption in the facility area. Most of the time, this is the easiest area to tackle since it will not direct impact to the process of the product. However, it must be done with thorough investigation before implementing any energy reduction measured to reduce to risk to the production floor.

For older facility systems, it may upgrade to newer versions if there is energy saving potential. Calculation on return of investment (ROI) should be able to tell if it is worth to upgrade to newer system.

Another most common area can help to reduce the energy consumption is the supply load should not constant throughout the 24 hours. For example if the production is slow down to 50% at the midnight, the supply loads to the production should cut to half as well. With such measured in place, the energy consumption is reduce by half.

Temperature and air circulation in the production floor also another area of energy consumption can be optimized.

2. Within the process itself
Changes in the process is very challenging due to any changes within the process, it required long period of qualification. If in the process development phases, all the in-efficient process steps already taken out, it will be no room for optimization already. If above scenario happen, the process owner will have no choice but to look at how to increase the equipment throughput. By increasing the number of output, it will means that using the same amount of energy to produce more product output. It is another dimension of energy reduction. A simple illustration will be, increased the speed of the handling robots, increase the speed of the conveyor and so on. I personally evaluate a lot of consumable by extending their usage life. As such, the cost of replacement is reduced.

Summary

Discussion above are just the two example how a factory can reduce energy consumption in simple way. Of course there are multiple ways of achieving lower energy usage depending on different industries in order to reduce the expenditure of the manufacturing line. As such the profit margin of the product can be higher.