Energy Efficiency in Industry: benefits for companies

The primary aim of improving energy efficiency in France and other industrialized countries, in industry as well as for private individuals, is economic: to reduce energy bills. This is not necessarily the case everywhere: in developing countries, where access to energy may be of lesser quality in certain areas, the primary objective may be to improve the guarantee of power supply stability and security (often referred to as resilience) for "critical" systems (health, telecommunications, etc.).

To achieve this objective for an industrial site, it is necessary to understand the process stages, map and quantify consumption and its evolution over time, in order to optimize in fine the ratio, corrected for uncontrollable factors (weather conditions, etc.), between energy consumed and production achieved. For each business environment, relevant indicators must be defined, characterizing this global objective in detail.

The same applies to the residential sector. This is the aim of a growing number of commercial offers of hardware and software devices to help monitor consumption, from active consumption management systems to batteries for electricity storage in residential homes. Smart meters", although the "intelligence" of the models currently being deployed is still very limited, are part of this trend: more predictable consumption that can be controlled in real time will eventually enable production resources to be better adapted.

At the interface between the home and the factory, the commercial sector is at the forefront of the emergence of "smart-building". With capacities for renewable energy production, electricity storage and energy data management, they can pool their resources with the neighborhood. It is both more robust, in the face of the vagaries of service provision by the networks to which it is connected, and more cooperative, capable of "stepping aside" to relieve them at times of peak demand.

Improving energy efficiency thus appears to be one of the driving forces behind a profound change in energy use, but also in the business models of players in the sector and the radical innovations that accompany it.

The corresponding potential has yet to be fully exploited at many industrial sites, which presupposes an awareness of the economic and technical stakes involved. A "system analysis" of each process, type of energy used, or consumption item, is a prerequisite for identifying and prioritizing potential energy efficiency improvements. This approach can lead to questioning habits, and revisiting certain processes: instead of letting a steel slab cool in the open air, we can actively cool it to recover its available energy. The energy management...