Plan for energy efficiency

"When drives were initially introduced some 40 years ago, the focus was on regulating motor speeds to improve production output," says Dave Hawley, general manager for ABB's UK motors and generators business. "It is only in later years that the focus on energy efficiency began to dominate. It is time to re-dress the balance and once again highlight the important features that variable-speed drives offer to improve productivity."

Included within the 10-stage plan is an energy and productivity appraisal that is undertaken by ABB and its network of authorised providers.

The appraisal starts by outlining the scope of supply, focusing on processes and applications where significant energy savings can be made. The next step is monitoring and data collection, which involves identifying applications that may be running inefficiently.

Data analysis takes the findings and identifies potential savings using dedicated software. The findings are presented to help identify where savings are likely to arise. Among the data available includes present energy usage, areas of potential savings, payback time if an investment is made in drives and or motors and carbon dioxide emission reduction.

Recommendations consist of an action plan, usually comprising an executive summary and a detailed engineer's report, highlighting applications that can benefit the most from using VSDs.

Meanwhile, new fieldbus options from ABB provide drives' users with fast control of processes and access to large amounts of data. Some of the latest VSDs from ABB offer two option slots for fieldbus modules. These modules can be of different types, allowing, for example, a Profibus module and an Ethernet module to be run at the same time.

Contact: ABB