Energy savings are small and unimpactful ... except they go directly to profit. How much a company has to produce, sell and ship to make the same profit? With a typical profit margin in manufacturing hovering around 5%, to generate $100K profit a company must sell $100K/5%=$2 mln worth of product. It's 2 weeks of work [...]
Yesterday I attended an interesting presentation at Energy Solutions Exhibition in Hamilton - a serious approach of Peak Power Inc to reducing demand during peak hours. Peak Power considers peak chasing a game of smarts, and they lots of them to the table. Weather your company belongs to Class A of Class B, Global Adjustment is [...]
Corporations routinely require energy projects to meet a 2 year simple payback threshold, which is another way of requesting a 50% return. Same corporations rarely enjoy returns in excess of 10% in their core business. Are CFOs mean to energy projects, plain stupid, or what? - Unlikely. Slow thinkers do not make it to corner offices. [...]
What is the value of saved kWh at our plant? This post continues the discussion about the $value of kWh, started in What is kWh worth at your plant. In that post we talked about effect of operational changes on cost of energy. Today we will talk about how value of energy efficiency projects shows [...]
Energy accounting is key to success of energy projects Selling, buying and implementing energy projects costs too much effort at both sides of the client-vendor divide, despite the best effort of professionals involved in the process. It does not have to. Why so many projects are either not sold, or not approved, or [...]
Which energy manager does CFO know by first name? Hands-on? Watchful? Strategic? A Hands-On energy manager walks the floor daily to personally check consumption of every machine. He is in one place at a time. A Watchful energy manager installs meters to check real-time energy performance. He monitors several machines at the same time. A [...]
Energy efficiency is becoming less and less about direct energy cost reduction and more about meeting demands of customers and governments. A recently published article Who Invests in Energy Efficiency? by American Council for an energy efficient economy sums up a range of studies about driving of energy efficiency investment in business. It comes out energy cost [...]
Even many C-levels today agree agrees that energy efficiency is important, still too often too little is done. How can this situation be changed? This 2003 article - Overcoming Barriers to Effective Energy Management in Industrial Settings - names several barriers which I list below with my comments: Lack of Organizational Commitment to energy efficiency [...]
Last week I had a pleasure of attending an intense Summer Conference set up by Association of Energy Services Professionals - AESP . One and a half days of presentations and panels were kicked off by a thought-provoking speech delivered by Patrick Schwerdtfeger about exponential nature of changes in our life, particularly massive automation [...]
More energy data is better, right? Data shows what's happening, so we should have lots of it to manager machines, right? Not necessarily. Although various meters are becoming cheaper by day, too many of them may hurt your business instead of helping to manage it. When driving, do you really need to know the exact [...]
