The savings potential is massive! In 2020, the global industry consumed 1000 TWh of energy to generate compressed air, but shockingly research reports are telling us that 50% of that is wasted. Not only that, but with the current trends, the energy consumption by compressed air would triple by 2050. Considering the goal to reach net-zero carbon emission by 2050, we need to use energy with much more responsibility.

In this Newsletter I am happy to announce our upcoming Spring Launch 2022! This online event is a must for anyone with an interest in sustainability topics and will be delivered on May 10th at 16:00 CEST with a recorded version on May 11th at 10:00 CEST to cover Asia. Be sure to sign up! This year we deliver the event in a factory environment and I am really looking forward to it! Amongst others, you will meet some of our partners and international experts on sustainability, energy efficiency and compressed air.

I think you can see that industrial compressed air is in for a big change. We are noticing some changes in that industry is creating job titles such as “Energy coordinator”, “Sustainability manager”, etc. which is good but it will not end there. Let me explain why.

Let’s make a comparison with the IT industry 15 years ago. They had various titles to coordinate the architecture of IT solutions; “Software architect”, “System architect” etc. These roles were created because an increasing amount of investments were done in different kinds of integration projects. Fitting together different pieces of technology was becoming a major obstacle. The problem was that the architects usually never had the mandate to change anything. They would propose a solution but more often than not their ideas would be ditched in the urge to get products ready for sale. Not until the responsibility of architecture was pushed down onto the teams implementing the technology did integration projects become more effective. It was a kind of cultural change where it was no longer acceptable to spend large amount of resources on integration.

The problem is the same with the new roles in industry. The production department (ie the consumer of energy) is concerned only with producing  in a fast, quality assured and profitable way and is measured accordingly. Faced with a proposal from an Energy coordinator to increase energy efficiency, what is the motivation to team up and execute to achieve those savings? I do not think there is any other way than making the production department inherently responsible for the energy that is consumed and the emissions that are caused, and to measure the success based on energy efficiency as well, not just the number of products shipped. That will also change the culture in the industry, aligning with the goals we have set in society. Compared to the IT industry example above, the stakes are much higher. It is about our common future.

Since 70-90% of the life cycle cost of compressed air is electrical energy, such a change would fundamentally impact the market as industry would demand not only efficient compressors, but efficient compressed air systems and efficient production machines.

In the meantime, we are now increasing our efforts to reach decision makers, including the CFO who pays the energy bill every month without knowing if that energy is being used in an energy efficient way.

At Enersize we are preparing for the change that is coming. We are creating new Energy Performance Indicators and benchmarks and investing in our core technology. We are also accelerating the growth of our international partner network so more industries can benefit from our solutions. For some really large industry customers we even offer the opportunity to become partners where they can use our know-how and expertise in all their production sites.

As part of accelerating the growth of our partner ecosystem, we are now also launching the Enersize Academy! The academy offers online training for partner technicians to quality assure the work they deliver to end customers. As a side effect, we also see an interest in general compressed air awareness training and we are responding to that. Anyone working at a production site should have some basic understanding of how compressed air is used and how much energy it is using. This is important for organizations that decide to initiate long term sustainable energy optimization of their compressed air.