Energy Audits Are the Pathway to Efficiency

Energy efficiency-focused maintenance is a new approach to mitigating high energy prices and addressing the growing need to lower environmental impacts through reduced energy consumption. The strategy comes into sharper focus when viewed through the lens of lower operating and investment budgets, premature failures and equipment obsolescence, or even the design of new facilities.

The principal goal of maintenance is to ensure that companies remain competitive within their core business. To this end, a key priority is to reduce the number of equipment failures that could potentially cause an unscheduled, and costly, interruption. This requires maintenance knowledge, energy efficiency and operational management. When properly combined and executed, these elements introduce a new perspective regarding energy efficiency maintenance.

In the past, parameters impacting the power performance of energy-consuming equipment had not been analyzed in depth. Maintenance was mainly focused on maintaining the availability and reliability of the equipment, not its efficiency. This notion has led to a spike in energy consumption because of problems rooted in the deterioration of the equipment’s physical and operational state. Examples include mechanical disparities, a lack of balance, an uneven operational control system and spoiling of filters and other elements. But as long as production rates or the availability of the equipment were unimpeded, there was little incentive for companies to address issues related to the equipment’s efficiency and the impact these issues have on energy efficiency.

Today’s focus on energy costs, alongside environmental concerns, is changing the game, and attention increasingly is turning to this new maintenance approach. Yet, what is not measured cannot be controlled or improved. For that reason, energy audits are an ideal pathway for companies to gauge their ability to diagnose issues and propose a solution focused on operation and maintenance with a direct impact on energy efficiency.

Energy efficiency-focused maintenance complements a company’s maintenance management in a way that not only increases the useful life of the equipment and improves its availability level but also produces significant savings on energy bills.

This is where a company like Veolus becomes a key ally. Veolus specializes in the efficiency of operational and maintenance support infrastructure, such as HVAC, PE, substations, PCI, compressed air, escalators, elevators, forklifts, boilers and cogeneration engines and turbines. As the company states, “we make the world function better.”