Howard W Penrose, Ph.D.
VP Electrical Reliability Programs
T-Solutions, Inc.
hpenrose@tsoln-inc.com
“Nuclear war would really set back cable TV.” – Ted Turner, Turner Broadcasting
“My advice is to focus 100% on doing your job better than anybody else. I’ve seen a lot of highflying people fall flat because they were so focused on the next job, they didn’t get the current job done.” – Carly Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett-Packard in 2001
“Sleep is a colossal waste of time.” – Thomas Edison
Energy Impact of Motor Management – Defined
“Modern management practices often do not take into account the importance of motor systems maintenance and management requirements. Through efforts in cost control, many industrial and commercial firms will reduce maintenance staffs, take least cost approaches to corrective actions, and sacrifice preventive maintenance programs. The result has been increased energy costs and downtime resulting from equipment not operating to full potential and failing unexpectedly. This problem results in billions of dollars of additional energy consumption and lost revenue.” – Howard W Penrose, Ph.D., ‘A Novel Approach to Electric Motor System Maintenance and Management for Improved Industrial and Commercial Uptime and Energy Costs,’ SUCCESS by DESIGN Publising, 1997.
The United States generated over 3,848 Billion kWh of electricity in 2003 of which approximately 2,270 Billion kWh (59%) were consumed by electric motor systems. Over 70% of the electric energy bill of an average manufacturing facility, and over 90% of an average process facility, is consumed by electric motor systems. The application of just a basic maintenance program would have an energy impact, alone, of 45.4 Billion kWh (approximately $6.8 Billion USD) nationally. Reliability programs have the potential impact of 317.8 Billion kWh of energy, or $47.7 Billion USD.
In 1998, I published a report showing that, in the USA alone, there are approximately 1.2 million motor failures per year totaling approximately 45 million horsepower. Of this there are 25 million horsepower manufactured (including for new applications) and 38.5 million horsepower repaired. From national approach, a potential of 300 average Mega-Watts per year could be saved if motors under 500 horsepower could be rewound with little or no impact on efficiency. In Illinois, where I published the report as a Senior Research Engineer with the University of Illinois’ Energy Resources Center, the impact was determined to be 66.3 million kWh per year, with an environmental impact of reducing CO2 emissions by 46,640 tons per year, NO2 by 160 tons per year and SO2 by 466 tons per year.
(Note: All of the above information was derived from US Department of Energy Office of Industrial Technologies reports and other US Government DOE and environmental reports and resources.)
Over 2004, I had focused on energy as a reliability metric. The reason is simple: While the energy impact in a facility through the improvement of motor system reliability is minimal (approximately 5%, or less), it is a value that can be immediately measured and quantified. Therefore, through this part of this Blog series, I will use formulae to estimate the savings in energy to show payback followed by payback calculated with a multiplier of 20 times the energy savings.
For instance:
A 50 horsepower, 94% efficient motor in a belted application, operating 6,000 hours per year at 70% load, $14/kW demand and $0.16/kWh energy cost with a man-hour cost of $200 average to align and tension the belts (assuming that the belts are slightly loose or worn):
Demand reduction: 0.56 kW
Energy usage reduction: 3,360 kWh
Energy Cost improvement: $630
Reliability multiplier: $12,600
Simple payback: 4 months energy/5 days reliability
Details on how these calculations are derived will come from two free e-books downloadable from http://www.motordoc.net:
Book 3: “A Novel Approach to Motor System Maintenance and Management for Improved Commercial and Industrial Uptime and Energy Costs,” Howard W Penrose, Ph.D., SUCCESS by DESIGN Publishing, 1997.
Book 4: “A Novel Approach to Industrial Assessments for Energy, Production, Reliability and Waste Stream,” Howard W Penrose, Ph.D., SUCCESS by DESIGN Publishing, 2000.