With the revival of the global economy, the manufacturing community in the energy industry is likely to witness a surge in developments. In such a scenario, manufacturers in the energy sector may profit in two ways. In the first case, they will be able to record considerable savings from operating overhead by making maximum use of machine tools that will help save significant amount of energy by utilising less power and reducing in-plant energy use. Secondly, the other potential opportunity that the manufacturers can benefit from is by upgrading new products that the energy industry needs to use.
Gradually, these benefits will trickle down to a variety of suppliers in the energy sector. For instance, the petroleum industry had sought the help of second-tier suppliers to solve a key problem in drilling. Normally, during the offshore well-drilling process, the pipe strings expands miles underneath the surface. Although millions are invested in pipe strings, the threaded pipe joints remain extremely vulnerable during the project. Recently, to safeguard these threads from damage, Emuge Corporation, one of the leading companies in thread-cutting technology, has produced a series of thread mills. These thread mills are specially designed to seal the leaking pipe joints in the natural-gas and petroleum sectors. Emuge has made a significant contribution in the petroleum and natural gas industry by producing threads of such unique dimensions that have effectively eliminated the problems in machine tapping or in-complex lay-down threading methods.
 Energy conservation
Conservation of energy is a key issue that the manufacturing companies should address by encouraging the use of wasteful energy in the existing plants. Manufacturing organisations should also form core teams that will be responsible to carry out energy audits of plants and make suitable recommendations. By initiating these steps, it is possible to save energy by 8–15% in each plant.
In a bid to save energy, at present, a lot of manufacturers are adopting simple yet effective steps of eliminating unnecessary back-up equipments that mostly lie unused for a considerable period of time. Organisations are also training its staffs to use energy-monitoring software.
Several manufacturing organisations are also taking innovative steps to improve their industrial processes by manufacturing titanium sheet using the rolling method, thereby deviating significantly from the traditional vacuum-melting process. In this new process, manufacturers generally use highly improved and cost-effective titanium powder. It has been proved that by using this method up to 50% of energy can be reduced for producing diverse titanium parts.
Solar power
At present, an increasing number of manufacturers are experimenting methods to harness the potential of solar and wind energy, which are sources of renewable energy. However, the major breakthrough of converting energy into usable power is yet to be achieved.
In the solar cell or photovoltaic (PV) device segment, R&D activities are in full swing to gauge the best alternatives to non-renewable fuels. Currently, manufacturers are mainly offering solar power devices in three categories, namely multimegawatt systems that support large facilities or towns, commercial systems that increase the capacity of grid power and single residual systems that are used to power single home or farm. HS Grewal, MD of Advance Navigation and Solar Technologies, a mid-sized solar equipment manufacturer in New Delhi |
