In many respects, I feel very awkward referring at this time to the supply of energy in Europe. But there is no doubt that the very sad situation in Ukraine will surely serve to accelerate the effort and mindset change we need to make to counter the threat to energy availability.
Why is it important to talk about energy efficiency of compressed air in such a dire situation?
In Sweden, we have the wording “många bäckar små”, which essentially means that many small changes can move mountains. How many industries do we have in Europe that use compressed air? How much energy are they consuming? In 2001, Fraunhofer Institute (link) estimated that 80 TWh of energy was fed to compressed air systems in industry in the EU and, significantly, that 50% could be saved.
One of the real strengths of technology development is to scale a solution to thousands or millions of clients and for such solutions to adapt to the information and decision making needs of clients. For instance, limited action in thousands of industries can make a concrete difference for our macroscopic energy usage.
Industry is quickly becoming digitalized but not without growing pains. The decision-makers on the top floor use information technology (IT) systems to manage the day to day operations, such as ERP (including finance) and CMMS (maintenance) systems, whilst production uses very advanced operational technology (OT) systems on the shop floor to run production. IT and OT systems have much in common, but still there is a chasm between them.
Together with experts such as Sigma Industry Solutions AB, we at Enersize are building bridges across this chasm. Sensors across the plant, no matter where they are or how they communicate, can contribute to the analysis of the compressed air system. It becomes a question of building a flexible and robust solution.
Using algorithms and machine learning Enersize can help you pull out important KPIs, trends and information that can be presented to decision-makers for them to take action. We do not distinguish demand from generation of compressed air: instead, we focus on the customer need to save energy, eliminate harmful emissions and improve production robustness.
Recently we have made great progress and I believe we are now creating innovations that will enable much faster and better insight into industrial compressed air systems. Are you ready to work with us and help make the world a better place?