ABB drives save energy
Electric motors in machinery consume huge quantities of electricity, even small improvements can lead to dramatic savings. ABB’s low-voltage drives, which control the power consumed by electric motors, saves an equivalent of 140 million tons of CO2 each year. Not bad.
The most important savings come from variable-speed drives, which raise the efficiency of electric motors. Electric motors are everywhere, and the machines they run account for more than a quarter of the world’s electricity consumption.
Installing variable-speed drives can reduce their power consumption dramatically (around 30%), leading to significant cost savings and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. In applications in homes, businesses and factories, ABB drives are helping our customers to do more using less.
In Sweden, for example, the operators of a power and district heating plant decided to install variable-speed drives to control the performance of the many electric motors in the plant.
ABB installed a total of eight medium-voltage drives, some of which replaced the existing resistor-based motor control systems. The improvements eliminated significant heat losses caused by the resistors and enabled the plant to produce an additional 35 GWh of electricity per year, an increase of about 5 percent.
The vast majority of electric motors in such plants control pump and fan operations, operating at full speed, even when they don’t need to. Most are controlled by throttling, variable-speed drives offer an alternative, energy-efficient means of motor control.
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