Is your machine’s power consumption costing you money?

With a name like The War of the Currents, you would think there was, at the very least, a little water involved. But this “war” was waged over something else that flows: Electricity.

During the late 19th century, prolific patent accumulator Thomas Edison championed direct current (DC) while the alternative, dubbed alternating current (AC), was the brainchild of inventors Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse.

In basic terms, DC uses constant voltage that has a unidirectional electric charge flow. In AC, current direction changes as does its voltage. AC and its backers won out because it was cheaper and easier to transmit this type of power over distance using step up/step down transformers.

It’s interesting to note that more than a century later many people still believe that Edison actually electrocuted an elephant in a publicity stunt to prove the power of DC over its competition. But the event, while disturbingly true, occurred many years after AC already had been accepted as the norm.

Today, the elephant in the room (sorry) is rising costs. The price of nearly everything is going up, including electricity rates.

If you combine all of the wattage used when you run your machines, automation, compressors, lighting, HVAC systems, and all other electricity-consuming devices, it adds up quickly. Utility companies are encouraging both residential and industrial customers to better manage consumption by creating time-of-use (TOU) pricing programs that vary electricity prices depending on the time of day. These TOU programs also vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

In 2017, researchers Sojung Kim, Chao Meng, and Young-Jun Son wrote in the journal Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory, that “owing to the ever-increasing requirements in sustainability, manufacturing firms are trying to reduce their energy consumption and cost.”

Their article “Simulation-based Machine Shop Operations Scheduling System for Energy Cost Reduction” is an example of the academic world taking this topic seriously. Manufacturing businesses need to follow suit.

The trick lies in minimizing energy consumption, and therefore cost, without sacrificing productivity. Some modern machine tools have even evolved to the point that on-board sensors now track energy consumption. It’s a good first step.

Machine shops typically try to reduce energy costs in two ways. The first is, obviously, by using energy-efficient CNC machines, compressors, and the like. The second is by performing tasks with heavy electrical consumption at times of the day when electricity costs are lower, typically at night (an off-peak TOU).

However, estimating the electricity consumption patterns of an entire machine shop is difficult without IT/OT/IIoT sensors and systems collecting data and analyzing consumption. Look for technology that not only collects consumption data, but also helps you with your shop scheduling to allow you to tailor your scheduling around peaks and valleys in your energy use.