There are two tables from a research did by Australian
Industry Group in 2012. In the first table, it shows the proportion of turnover
in 2008 and 2011 Australian business spend on energy.
This table clearly indicates that the business energy costs of
manufacturing company have risen since 2008 to 2011. The reason of the increasing
is mainly because the price of energy keeps going up. Thus, as the article Manufacturing Resource Productivity
says, this trend will cause the manufacturers face more challenge in the
industry because it will significantly reduce the profit as shows in the table.[1]
Although Manufacturing
Resource Productivity mainly talked about how to redesign the products so
that the manufacturers can reduce the cost of manufacturing, it did mention
that the cost of energy occupies an important proportion of the total cost. In
this blog, I will talk about how to manage energy cost to establish a greater
operational stability.
From the view of manufacturers, energy efficiency is to reduce
the amount of energy a manufacturer uses to produce a unit of product. Here is
a table about the improvement of some methods to improve energy efficiency.
From it we can see that there are some measures popular
among the manufacturers. They are: identify major uses of energy in the
business, change staff practices to encourage energy efficiency, conduct a
formal energy audit on assessment and so on. In the research, Australian
Industry Group mentioned that most of the company saved the cost of energy less
than 5% of the total energy cost. Although the percentage seemed negligible,
the real number will be huge. Thus, these methods can be considered useful.[2]
There are three major reasons of reducing energy cost.
Reducing cost is an obvious and direct reason for manufacturers to reduce
energy cost. The other two reasons are reducing carbon emissions and reducing
risks of the fluctuating energy price. Reducing carbon emissions is not from
the view of environment protection. It is because some countries are charging
fees for the carbon a manufacturer emits. Also, the more energy a manufacturer
consumes, the greater the risk of increasing energy price and the risk of
energy shortage. [3]
After reading all these research reports, a problem came
into my mind. Although reducing energy cost seems to have so many benefits for
manufacturers, actually the manufacturers do not pay too much attention on it.
I think it is mainly because reducing energy cost needs a long time to see the
effect and sometimes the improvement of energy efficiency is negligible to the
manufacturers. Thus, little manufacturers can persist. Another problem I
concerned is that the manufacturers take action only after they found that the
cost of energy is huge. I think they should first do some assessment about the
consequence and cost of the plan of their use of energy. Then if there are
problems, they can change the plan and evaluate again. Do not remedy the
situation after it happens.
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