30 n ENERGY EFFICIENCY September 2026 www.drivesncontrols.com You don’t need a new factory to improve your efficiency For most manufacturers, sustainability begins with knowing where energy goes. Utility bills and main meters show a total, but not whether a spike happened during productive running, a changeover, or an unattended idle period. You need that context to improve efficiency. The starting point is sub-metering at the line or machine level, combined with sensors that capture machine states in real time – running, standby, faulted or changeover. Photoelectric sensors and IO-Link devices make this practical without extensive rewiring. Once energy figures are linked to operational states, patterns emerge quickly. How much does a machine consume at idle, and which line segment accounts for the largest avoidable losses? That is the foundation for everything else. The opportunity is significant. EU industrial energy efficiency has improved by around 19% since 2010, yet the Union remains 18% short of its binding 2030 target, and progress has slowed since 2022. The IEA has found that energy consumption for equivalent products can vary by a factor of five to seven between facilities in the same subsector – an indication of how much unrealised potential sits on an average factory floor. In one documented example, around-theclock monitoring of a clean-room environment revealed that air-conditioning could be switched off during certain hours with no impact on quality – a saving that would be invisible without contextualised data. Efficiency is also a component-selection decision. DC power supplies are among the most energy-intensive elements in a control panel: older devices can drop below 85% efficiency under partial load, while modern high-efficiency supplies maintain efficiencies of 93-96% across variable loads. The difference is measurable in CO2 terms. Replacing a 240W power supply with an equivalent device that raises efficiency from 88% to 93%, saves roughly 3.5-14.7kg of CO2 a year, depending on the local energy mix. Scaled across a facility, replacing several older power supplies with fewer, higherefficiency ones, the annual savings can reach hundreds of kilograms of CO2, with no changes to machine output. The same logic applies to drives. Inverters that are ten or more years old dissipate braking energy as heat in resistors. Modern regenerative drives feed it back into the DC bus or supply network – particularly useful in dynamic applications such as servo axes, press drives, or winding systems with frequent starts and stops. Predictive maintenance Sustainability also extends to the useful life of machines. Equipment replaced early carries an embodied carbon cost, while running degraded equipment carries a direct, often overlooked, energy penalty. A motor with increasing bearing wear draws measurably more current than a healthy one, often for weeks before failure. A misaligned coupling or blocked filter can have the same effect. Condition-monitoring sensors for vibration, temperature and current, integrated with the machine controller via IO-Link, give early warning of such drifts in behaviour. Keeping components within design parameters reduces both unplanned downtime and the excess energy that degraded equipment draws. For machinebuilders, designing in these sensor points from the outset avoids costly retrofits and gives a built-in sustainability credential. Technology is necessary, but not sufficient. One consistent obstacle is the gap between a successful pilot on one line, and systematic improvement across a whole facility. Data structures vary between machine generations, OT and IT systems are rarely integrated, and energy KPIs are defined inconsistently across departments. Closing this gap requires technical support and a clear methodology: identifying energy losses; defining auditable KPIs tied to production output – such as kWh per part produced, an increasingly common requirement in supply-chain sustainability reporting – and building the cross-functional capability to act on them at scale. The aim is a repeatable cycle of measuring, analysing, controlling and improving – not a one-off audit. This also matters for manufacturers facing Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and other reporting obligations: consistently collected sensor data, tied to machine states and production records, gives an evidence base that manual collection cannot match. None of this requires new facilities. Much of it can be built into existing structures: the right sensor in the right place, a more efficient power supply, an idle-state strategy, a KPI linking energy to output. n You don’t have to build a new factory to improve sustainability in your manufacturing operations. You can start by understanding where energy is actually consumed on existing production lines. Patricia Torres, industry marketing manager for food and commodities at Omron Industrial Automation Europe, explains. With the right equipment, the energy efficiency of existing industrial installations can be improved
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