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Scott Dunning, Electrical Engineering Technology Professor, University of Maine: "Maine companies are focusing greatly right now on energy savings because it has become such a significant part of their bottom line. It's a fixed cost that has grown, in some cases almost exponentially. So, the opportunities are there for savings, and many people now are focusing on what they can do to make changes in operations to cut those costs. We want to look at any piece of energy-consuming equipment in our facility and ask, 'Can we shut it off?' Say for this lathe. I wouldn't want to leave this spinning on idle when I didn't need it. There's plenty of equipment in a normal industrial process that's left idling during breaks and at lunchtime--you start adding up those hours over time and that's very real costs. So, we want to shut off any idling equipment when we can. When we're running any piece of equipment that's motor-driven--there's a motor in here that drives this piece of equipment--on a normal process, we find that the average motor is 50% loaded. When you buy a motor, you may look at the nameplate and it says its 92% efficient. However, if you run that motor at 40% load, it's not running at 90% efficiency--it might be at 80% or 70% efficiency. So, if you have a motor that's running at less than half load, you want to look to see if you can downsize that motor. You want to look at all your fuel sources that you consume in your facility. Look at your electric bills. What is the structure? Are you billed on the time that you use that energy, under what we call time of use? If so, you may want to shift when you consume that energy. Move it to an off-peak period where the cost is less. Certain things that are very common are, you have something that's recharged--say, an electric forklift--charge that during an off-peak period, set up a schedule, versus just plugging it in during the day when your peak prices are higher. One thing to remember that's key is, I tell people, 'a dollar saved is equivalent to two dollars earned.' And what I mean is if I can save a dollar in my energy consumption, that's a straight, direct savings to me. I would almost have to sell two dollars more product to get that one dollar in net savings. So, it's definitely worth investing in energy savings."
