US expects energy savings through smart manufacturing
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US expects energy savings through smart manufacturing
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anufacturing has been a topic of interest in the materials community lately with significant focus on advanced and high-tech materials manufacturing. A second area that is poised to have a sizable impact on the manufacturing sector in the United States is smart manufacturing. A bill, titled the Smart Manufacturing Leadership Act (SMLA), seeks to “transform the manufacturing sector and the use by the manufacturing sector of energy, water, raw materials, and labor …[which] will result in savings in electricity, natural gas, transportation fuels, chemical feedstocks, and many other fuels.” The bill was first introduced in the US Senate in April 2015 by Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), and has since gained support in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. In June 2015, Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) joined Senator Shaheen as a co-sponsor of the senate version of the bill (S.1054) and Representative Peter Welch (D-Vt.) introduced an identical version of the bill in the House (H.R. 3266) in July 2015. The term smart manufacturing is defined within the bill as “a set of
advanced sensing, instrumentation, monitoring, controls, and process optimization technologies and practices that merge information and communication technologies with the manufacturing environment for the real-time management of energy, productivity, and costs across factories and companies.” As smart manufacturing practices are implemented, production efficiencies increase, which in turn improves competitiveness of the manufacturer as well as reduces fuel consumption and the environmental impacts of the manufacturing process. The bill seeks to establish a national smart manufacturing plan and to provide support for small- and mediumsized manufacturers—companies with fewer than 500 employees at the plant site, gross annual sales of less than $100 million, and annual energy bills between $100,000 and $2.5 million. The focus on this segment of the manufacturing industry was explained in Senator Shaheen’s news release announcing the introduction of the SMLA, which said that small- and medium-sized manufacturers often lack the staff resources, expertise,
and capital needed to implement smart manufacturing technologies. Since the introduction of the SMLA, the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources (ENR) has put together a comprehensive energy bill that includes key provisions from the SMLA. The omnibus bill, titled the Energy Policy Modernization Act (EPMA) of 2015 (S. 2012), is the culmination of four committee hearings where 114 bills were considered and discussed. Several of these bills were incorporated, in part or whole, in the EPMA, a comprehensive energy package that according to the ENR committee “represents the common ground that exists for modernizing our energy policies on efficiency, infrastructure, supply, accountability, and reauthorizing conservation programs.” The EPMA includes two provisions from the SMLA. The first of these seeks to expand the US Department
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