With oil and gas prices down, and energy, for the moment, apparently cheap and plentiful, it might be tempting to put energy efficiency on the back burner. But experience shows that's a bad strategy for both short-term profits and longer-term competitiveness: like reliability, energy efficiency requires constant vigilance and unending efforts to improve.
The connection between reliability and energy efficiency is more than a simile. "Increasing utilization with less shutdown time means more productivity per hour, which reduces energy per pound," says Michael Tay, Pavilion product manager, Rockwell Automation. "Shutdowns and startups themselves tend to waste energy, losing it during cool-downs and wasting it bringing equipment back up to temperature."