The customer’s automotive assembly plant was using over 40,000 kilowatt hours of electricity during daily production to generate the compressed air needed for assembly operations. At $0.05 per kilowatt hour this amounted to about $2,000 per day. In addition, the compressed air system was unreliable and prone to failures that would completely stop the assembly lines. This resulted in a production loss that equaled one vehicle per minute during peak production. If the price of that vehicle was $20,000 a 10-minute outage would cost as much as $200,000.

Challenge The first priority was to enhance the existing compressed air system in order to make it reliable and controllable from anywhere in the plant. In addition, an automatic fail over system was implemented to reduce outage times to zero. The second priority was to ensure that the various compressors that fed the system were being used as efficiently as possible to reduce energy costs.