
Energy makes hard times for industries
If residential and the tertiary sector or transport are at the peak the biggest consumers of energy, in data corrected for seasonal variations where the effect of heating is smoothed over the year, the industry sector takes the lead ranking. Moreover, it is the only sector where gas competes with electricity as the main source and the current gas crisis is having an even greater impact on industry, whose machines and processes cannot necessarily easily be migrated to another source of energy.
Above all, the weight of energy-related expenditure in production budgets has exploded, leading certain energy-intensive industries to temporary closure (at least we hope) such as, for example, the famous glass manufacturer DURALEX which has seen its electricity bill quadrupled between 2021 and 2022 and decided on a 6-month shutdown from November 2022 because production was simply no longer profitable.
According to UNIDEN, for the most electro-intensive companies (production of aluminium, chlorine, metallurgy or even glass, chemicals and petrochemicals, etc.), electricity represents just over 20% of the cost price of their products.
In such a crisis situation, the audit of the installations is the first measure to be put in place in order to know precisely which are the major consumers within the industrial company. The energy audit is also compulsory for companies with a workforce of more than 250 employees, or which declare a turnover of more than 50 million euros.
Thus we can highlight immediately effective actions such as:
– Know the consumption of each machine and plan the operation of the most greedy during off-peak hours
– Optimize heating/air conditioning which are energy-intensive in the large volumes of industrial buildings and adapt the temperature to the actual use of the premises
– Save industrial fluids such as compressed air for example which can be very expensive: simply stopping the compressors outside the production period is an immediate gain such as reducing pressure, the use of steam or chilled water or other types of industrial gases
– As in buildings, unnecessary or unsuitable lighting is a financial waste.
But the industry lacks metering, for example there is of course electric metering but often global and there are no or few sub-meters, per workshop, per activity or per machine and it is not possible to connect and install equipment everywhere.
Thanks to the integration of wireless battery-powered IOT sensors using, for example, the LORA protocol, e3m from SILENO makes it possible, at less cost and without installation costs, to set up a real measurement grid for all types of energy. e3m allows you to know your uses as closely as possible and to adapt the energy distribution accordingly. Major manufacturers have trusted SILENO and the returns on investment generally observed often in less than a year and rarely beyond 3 years. With the cost of energy exploding, we can think that these ROI times will be even more reduced.