28 n ENERGY EFFICIENCY September 2026 www.drivesncontrols.com Energy delay is a decision, not a default Most manufacturers think that they haven’t made any decisions regarding energy optimisation yet. But they have. Every quarter that a plant runs on its current schedule, with existing inefficiencies, is a quarter that the company has chosen to keep paying for these inefficiencies. “We’ll get to it” is not a holding position. It’s a spending decision, made by default, and it’s expensive. Here’s the arithmetic – because it’s the part that usually gets skipped. Take a plant with a £20m annual energy bill. Suppose 5% of that is recoverable through better scheduling, leak detection, and idle-time control. It may sound like rounding error, but 5% of £20m is £1m a year, every year, recurring. Wait three years for a “better time” and you’ve spent £3m on inefficiencies that you already knew about. And that’s before energy prices move at all – and they will move, so the real figure is far worse. That’s the trap with energy waste. It doesn’t trigger an alarm. A compressed-air leak doesn’t page anyone at 2am. Machines idling between cycles don’t show up as being defective. Peak-demand charges from bad sequencing arrive a month later, buried in a utility bill that nobody reads line-by-line. The cost is real and the feedback is silent – the worst combination for getting anything fixed. Logic is breaking down For a long time, treating energy as a line item to be negotiated down made sense. Sign a good contract, run an audit every few years, move on. But that logic is breaking down for reasons that have nothing to do with sustainability slogans, and everything to do with risk. Electricity prices swing more widely than they used to. Gas markets carry geopolitical risks that show up in your P&L. Renewables change the shape of supply across a day. Carbon pricing keeps tightening, on a schedule set by regulators rather than by you. A plant that can see its energy use only in monthly hindsight is exposed to all of this, and can react to none of it. By the time the utility bill lands, the money is gone. Plants that handle volatility well, share one capability: they can move. They shift energy-intensive runs, re-sequence operations to reduce warm-up cycles, and flatten demand spikes before they become penalties. That’s not an energy team doing energy things. That’s the production schedule itself becoming energy-aware. The blind spot sits between planning and the meter. This is the part that most operations leaders underrate. Production scheduling and energy consumption are tightly coupled, and almost nobody plans them together. Schedules get optimised for throughput, on-time delivery, labour costs, and machine utilisation. Energy almost never enters the equation. Two schedules that ship the exact same output can result in widely different energy bills, and the planner has What is the true cost of delaying energy optimisation in industrial facilities? Prashanth Mysore, senior director for strategic business development at Delmia, explores how hidden energy waste in manufacturing businesses can lead to millions in energy bills.
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