Every industrial equipment and machinery presents opportunities in energy efficiency - in varying degrees. Focussed efforts around energy efficiency improvements for key equipment could bring in significant energy and monetary savings.
Electric motors alone consume about 40% of all electricity produced. While electric motors are already quite efficient (85-90%), even a 5% additional improvement could make a big difference given the omnipresence of motors the world over, especially for large scale industrial applications. Many other industrial equipment have or operate at low efficiencies, and thus the cumulative energy efficiency opportunity for industrial equipment and machinery is significant.
For many industrial equipment, energy efficiency enhancement had been an ongoing part of their evolution over the past many decades, even before climate change and decarbonization became important. These efficiency improvements were driven mainly by market needs to improve performance and economics. Most of these efforts were however mostly incremental in nature. Given the urgency of climate action by industries, there is a clear need for effective - and if need be even disruptive innovations - to dramatically increase efficiencies for particular industrial applications.
A key challenge for this sector is the lack of knowledge and awareness among industrial users about energy efficiency possibilities in industrial equipment such as cooling towers, heat exchangers, separation/filtration equipment, blowers etc.
Innovations in this domain for the 2020-2030 period are likely to be in the incorporation of sensors into industrial equipment, more efficient equipment for insulation, efficient water management and cooling equipment, efficient motors, turbines and compressed air systems, and use of business models such as ESCO (energy as a service) to drive faster adoption of energy efficient equipment.
Electric motors for industrial uses alone consume about 6500 TWh of electricity per year, about 25% of total electricity produced worldwide, and resulting in CO2 emissions of about 3 billion tons.
Furnaces of all sizes together consume about 10,000 TWh of energy per year, resulting in CO2 emissions of about 2 billion tons.
These two alone thus contribute to about 5 billion tons of CO2 emissions, indicating the potential for CO2 emissions reduction from key industrial equipment.
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