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Image source: Patrick George
The next significant achievement in reducing carbon emissions and controlling climate change is expected to be realized through the Internet of Things (IoT). By considering the energy they use, leveraging cheap sensors for more granular data, and utilizing inexpensive computing for faster and deeper analysis, companies can rethink their operational costs.
At Schneider Electric’s factory in Lexington, Kentucky, workers manufacture electronic components, including load centers and switches. The company has set a five-year goal to reduce energy consumption by 5% annually for this factory, which is now in the fourth year of this plan. In the first two years, it achieved this energy reduction goal. After that, management decided to deploy sensors and tools that enable richer analyses to study the factory’s product mix and the production sequence of these products more closely. They realized that by changing the product production mix and sequence, they could save a significant amount of energy.
How much can be saved? After adjusting the product production mix, the factory’s energy consumption decreased by 12% in the third year and by 10% in the fourth year. Andy Bennett, former Senior Vice President of Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure platform (which drives innovation in the factory), stated: “The entire group has focused on processes, and energy savings are now a crucial basis for every process decision. What has changed in the past five years is the technology and the driving force and demand for sustainability.”
Bennett said that despite the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, many American business leaders still value reducing carbon emissions. Reducing energy consumption can improve the bottom line, but many manufacturers have not focused on it due to a lack of tools or motivation.
As companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google realize that electricity consumption is a significant cost of doing business, data centers underwent a similar shift in thinking in the early 2000s. To address this issue, they prioritized performance per watt and pressured their suppliers, Intel and AMD (American Advanced Micro Devices), to focus on this metric.
The results have been impressive. A report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 2016 showed that despite an increase in computing power, the energy consumption of these companies’ data centers remained flat, saving them about $60 billion in energy costs each year.
Now it is the turn of the manufacturing industry. Schneider Electric is not the only company using sensor data and artificial intelligence to optimize its energy-saving solutions. This year, at the Bosch Connected World IoT conference held in Berlin, this German industrial giant showcased software that tracks industrial manufacturing processes’ energy consumption and calculates how much energy each process requires.
Another large European company, IKEA, is also tracking its energy usage. Furthermore, it has calculated the energy consumed in producing each product to decide whether to manufacture that product. Known for its efforts in environmental protection, IKEA focuses on energy consumption during the manufacturing process and the expected lifespan of products. Its sustainability manager, Lena Pripp-Kovac, stated that if an item requires a significant amount of energy to produce or cannot be effectively recycled, then they will not manufacture it.
IKEA may have a dedicated business department for sustainability, but this is not feasible for many manufacturing companies. Fortunately for them, the Internet of Things will make similar analyses easier to achieve. This benefits all of us.
This article will be published in the print edition of IEEE SPECTRUM in October 2018, titled “The Frugal Factory”.
