What’s a fast way to drain your budget without noticing? Let energy leak out of your operation one kilowatt-hour at a time.

The world runs on energy, and demand is increasing. The International Energy Agency projects global electricity demand to grow by approximately 3.9%. The increase is driven by the electrification of transportation and heating, the explosive growth of data centers powering AI and cloud computing, and continued industrial advancements in the developing world. For industrial operators, this translates to rising costs at a moment when margins are tightening.

There’s a path forward: operational energy management. Instead of waiting for the next capital project, you can identify and eliminate waste in your existing systems, often with minimal investment. The catch? You need visibility into where your energy actually goes. Without measurement, you’re unable to distinguish normal consumption from costly inefficiencies quietly draining your budget month after month.

A Case from Home

Appliances in the home are major energy users, which naturally draws attention to active energy-saving measures like adjusting the thermostat before heading out for the day. But what about the appliances that run constantly in the background? The refrigerator, for instance, hums quietly 24/7 without complaint until something goes wrong.

Consider this recent scenario from a HanAra member: After a couple of years of reliable operation, their refrigerator’s motor started running more frequently. The change was subtle enough to ignore while focusing on other energy-saving efforts. When condensation began building up inside, a minor temperature adjustment seemed like a reasonable fix. The energy bill didn’t show any dramatic spike, just a modest increase that could easily be attributed to warmer summer weather.

Weeks passed before mold appeared inside the refrigerator despite regular cleaning. The cause remained elusive until a cold draft was detected with the doors fully closed. Troubleshooting took time. Was it the refrigerator or the freezer? Eventually, the culprit revealed itself: the door seal wasn’t working properly unless the door was pulled shut a certain way. After realigning the doors and verifying the seal was fully seated, the problem was finally resolved, but only after weeks of wasted energy and compromised food quality.

Takeaways for Industrial Organizations

This simple household story illustrates several concepts that apply directly to industrial energy management:

1.    Context is important, but even with a combination of symptoms, it’s sometimes easy to ignore or miss obvious signs.

The motor running more frequently and the condensations were clues, but the connection to an issue wasn’t made until the problem became undeniable with mold.

2.    Knowing where you’ve been and where you are can give you clues to solving an issue, but that doesn’t provide perfect information.

The energy bill showed an increase, but without granular data about specific appliances, the member attributed it to weather rather than equipment malfunction.

3.    Small leaks or inefficiencies can add up quickly (or slowly) over time.

A faulty door seal seems trivial, but over months, the cumulative energy waste and safety impact become significant.

Industrial Energy Management

In industrial settings, the scale is larger and the stakes are higher. A single inefficiency at one site can add up quickly. Multiply that across multiple facilities, and the financial impact becomes staggering, not to mention the environmental implications and increased wear on equipment working harder than necessary.

Effective industrial energy management starts with comprehensive visibility into energy usage across your operations. This means tracking not just total facility usage, but understanding energy flows throughout your processes. It requires correlating energy data with production output, ambient conditions, equipment status, and operational modes to identify true inefficiencies rather than normal operational variations.

The goal is to transition from reactive problem-solving, triggered by an unexplained spike on a utility bill, to proactive optimization. This involves identifying anomalies in real time, benchmarking performance against historical baselines, and predicting equipment issues before they escalate into costly failures.

How a Data Historian Helps

A data historian serves as the foundation for sophisticated energy management by providing reliable, time-series data collection and storage. Unlike traditional databases, historians are optimized for the continuous, high-frequency data streams typical in industrial environments, capturing readings from energy meters, sensors, and equipment controllers every second if needed.

This historical context is crucial. When you notice higher-than-expected energy consumption, you can quickly compare current performance against previous weeks, months, or years, adjusting for variables like production volume, weather conditions, or equipment configuration changes.

Some industrial data historians include energy management modules that can track consumption by area, production line, or equipment type. In addition, you can create custom calculations to derive metrics like energy intensity, peak demand charges, or efficiency ratios.

Key Energy Management Capabilities

Facility-Wide Energy Monitoring
  • Visualize major plant resource usage, including electricity, gas, and water, across your entire operation.
  • Monitor real-time energy consumption by process, department, and site, with automated alarms when performance deviates from established target thresholds.
  • Track real-time greenhouse gas emissions based on current energy consumption to meet sustainability goals.
Energy Performance Management
  • Monitor energy goals and targets by type with comprehensive performance tracking.
  • Analyze detailed energy usage by specific processes and equipment status, and receive alerts when usage performance exceeds predefined targets.
  • Visualize energy consumption patterns through interactive charts and data graphics that make complex information accessible.
Plant Energy and Cost Controls
  • Manage comprehensive electricity usage and consumption across your entire facility.
  • Monitor major energy consumption patterns categorized by product or systems, and track energy cost performance against targets using real-time usage data.
  • Review power rates through time-of-use management to optimize energy consumption during peak and off-peak hours.
Production Energy Analytics
  • Track energy usage aligned with production timelines and manufacturing schedules.
  • Visualize production schedules by product type for operational planning, and calculate unit energy consumption data per production cycle and timeframe.
  • Access comprehensive energy usage information through flexible data queries that answer your specific operational questions.

How Predictive Analytics Helps

Here’s a fundamental truth: reliable plants are cost-effective plants. When equipment operates inefficiently, working harder than it should, energy usage climbs, maintenance costs increase, and unexpected failures disrupt production schedules.

Having comprehensive energy data is powerful, but the real advantage comes from knowing what to do with it. With a strong foundation in historical and real-time context, you can look beyond what’s happening right now to anticipate problems before they escalate. While a historian tells you what your energy consumption is and has been, predictive analytics identifies when something is going wrong. It uncovers the subtle patterns and correlations buried in massive data volumes that would take human observers weeks or months to identify.

By applying machine learning algorithms to your historian data, you can:

  • Detect equipment degradation early. Just like a refrigerator motor running more frequently signaled a problem, subtle changes in equipment operational patterns often indicate developing issues before they become critical.
  • Improve maintenance timing. Instead of reactive repairs after failure or time-based preventive maintenance that may be too frequent or too late, predictive analytics helps you intervene at an optimal moment.
  • Reduce unnecessary work. Maintenance teams can focus resources on equipment that actually needs attention rather than performing routine checks on assets that are performing normally.

The result is a maintenance strategy driven by data rather than guesswork and a practice that reduces energy waste, extends equipment life, and minimizes unplanned downtime.

Getting Started

The path to better energy management doesn’t require a complete operational overhaul. Start with measurement and visibility. Understand where your energy goes, identify the most significant opportunities for improvement, and implement changes systematically. Whether it’s at home or in a manufacturing plant, the principle remains the same: you can’t manage what you don’t measure.

And once you can measure, the opportunities for improvement become clear one data point at a time.