This headline is misleading clickbait. Koch Industries owns a company that's developing software that could reduce AC induction motor energy consumption by 1/3. They haven't actually done it yet.
Koch is reducing energy consumption of AC Induction Motors by 1/3
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Re: Koch is reducing energy consumption of AC Induction Motors by 1/3
#12Asking as an ill-informed European. Is this the Koch of the Koch Brothers that I only know as the financiers behind the GOP and climate denialism and bankrolling efforts to gut environmental protection laws?
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One of the most fascinating incidents with the Koch brothers is when they funded Richard A. Muller, a prominent skeptic of global warming with actual scientific chops, to do his own temperature reconstruction via Berkeley Earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Earth
According to Richard, the Koch brothers were genuinely curious about climate change (an odd claim when they were aggressively funding propaganda casting doubt on it). In the end Richard's team got the exact same results in their temperature reconstruction as the other 5 or so efforts had (NASA Giss, NOAA, Japan, UK, etc). and Muller wrote this piece for the NYTtimes, detailing how he was no longer a skeptic https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of... (it was a bit amusing to see how he characterizes the whole episode, "NOW we know this is real" because he had a hand in it, despite 5 other groups already getting the same result decades earlier!)
Anyway, this event did not then cause the Koch brothers to apologize and stop funding climate science denialism, they still do it.
Re: Koch is reducing energy consumption of AC Induction Motors by 1/3
#13Seems like they installed variable frequency drives (their "algorithm) on their motors; nothing more.
Yup companies like Pentair have been doing this industrially (and on more consumer stuff like pool filter pumps) for years now. I would guess the newer part might be adjusting parameters in a coordinated way via a network... enabling those hacker movies where someone on a laptop can startup all the machines in a factory with a few keypresses.
Re: Koch is reducing energy consumption of AC Induction Motors by 1/3
#14To be clear, AC motors can already be 98+% efficient. So, those double digit gains are inherently limited to a subset of relatively inefficient motors. It’s very much useful research, but don’t expect miricals.
Re: Koch is reducing energy consumption of AC Induction Motors by 1/3
#15Worth pointing out that due to their efficiency, what this has to be about is not making the motors more efficient, but reducing the power output, e.g. by making the driven mechanical load more efficient. Edit: Skimming the article makes it sound like they switched from U/f control to vector control.
Yes, every AC motor with IE3 has already an effciency something like 90 to 92%. For the double price you can get a synchron motor with an effciency around 95%.
Inverters for the drive generate heat in the cabinet .. so you do need active cooling quickly in the cabinet. So somebody also has to change and clean the filters. Just be careful with all the numbers.
Re: Koch is reducing energy consumption of AC Induction Motors by 1/3
#16The big news here is that Koch industries is actually issuing a press release bragging about reducing energy consumption. The mere fact that Koch industries publicly states that using less energy something to be proud of is a big change.
As far as the actual energy savings, technology wise they are not really anything new. Such savings are only possible because their machines seem to have been very energy inefficient to begin with.
If they really want to push the edge they should get rid of their lossy induction motors and install BLDCs or reluctance motors.
But they are correct that electric motors use up a lot of the worlds power and existing known improvements in electric motors can greatly reduce power use.
Re: Koch is reducing energy consumption of AC Induction Motors by 1/3
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
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One of the most fascinating incidents with the Koch brothers is when they funded Richard A. Muller, a prominent skeptic of global warming with actual scientific chops, to do his own temperature reconstruction via Berkeley Earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Earth According to Richard, the Koch brothers were genuinely curious about climate change (an odd claim when they were aggressively funding propaganda c…
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Re: Koch is reducing energy consumption of AC Induction Motors by 1/3
#18The article is a bit misleading. They talk about how many AC induction motors there are and how much power they consume. I don't doubt those numbers. But the vast majority of those are synchronous: they run at a set speed.
What they are working on is variable speed motors which need a special "drive" (aka VFD) device to convert the constant 50 or 60 Hz power supply to a variable frequency. Now VFDs are getting more common as simply using a VFD can make big efficiency gains on a process. But VFDs are still not the norm yet.
Re: Koch is reducing energy consumption of AC Induction Motors by 1/3
#19I learned something new, the efficiency rating is really different than what occurs when in use, so 90% efficiency pans out as less than 70%. So the work here is to keep the temperature of the motor down to maintain efficiency.
the difficulty is not all motors are of course able to be programmed so while this fix will help those that are it does point out that there are still big energy savings to be had to replace existing 'dumb' motors. Now I will mention the obvious, none of them should be on the net but I can see a local network that is air gap being useful
Re: Koch is reducing energy consumption of AC Induction Motors by 1/3
#20Reducing per unit energy consumption (aka increasing energy efficiency) is not only very different from reducing global energy consumption, but it can often lead to an increase in global energy consumption. This is called Jevons paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox and is quite an interesting topic.
This sounds like a sort of Malthusian trap like argument. The economy is de-materializing while continuing to grow so I don’t think this paradox is a stable truth.