One of the points I’ve mentioned here — you can’t manage what you can’t measure — is something that I think will become increasingly important in the coming years. Whether you’re concerned about peak oil and the legendary lack of data transparency regarding OPEC reserves and operations that Matt Simmons and other have talked about endlessly, or climate chaos and gathering the information needed so decision makers at all levels of society can choose truly “greener” options (and not merely make semi-educated guesses), measurement is a Very Big Deal.
We’re seeing a lot more attention being paid to measurement and management in the E&E arena. Some things, like WalMart outfitting their 18-wheelers with aerodynamic fairings, seem like no-brainers that were just waiting for the right combination of economic incentive and corporate perception of self-interest to be implemented. Others, like package delivery services planning routes to avoid left-hand turns, seem silly, at least until one sees the actual (as in measured) cost, fuel, and CO2 savings.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I think we have to remain open to measuring the real world and the things we do in it, especially when those numbers surprise or annoy us; we’re surrounded by unknown inconvenient truths, to borrow a phrase, and should be aggressively trying to discover, understand, and respond to them. One very minor example of this approach was my recent post, Stop the CNG insanity!, in which I pointed out how little CNG vehicles do to reduce greenhouse gases, despite their being almost universally lauded as a much “cleaner” technology. If you accept that CO2 emissions are a grave problem for humanity, requiring something akin to the “80% by 2050″ emissions reduction target that’s typically used as the standard, then CNG vehicles make no sense whatsoever.
All of this ran through my mind as as I read the article,MIT: ‘Alarming’ use of energy in modern manufacturing methods:
Modern manufacturing methods are spectacularly inefficient in their use of energy and materials, according to a detailed MIT analysis of the energy use of 20 major manufacturing processes.
Overall, new manufacturing systems are anywhere from 1,000 to one million times bigger consumers of energy, per pound of output, than more traditional industries. In short, pound for pound, making microchips uses up orders of magnitude more energy than making manhole covers.
At first glance, it may seem strange to make comparisons between such widely disparate processes as metal casting and chip making. But Professor Timothy Gutowski of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, who led the analysis, explains that such a broad comparison of energy efficiency is an essential first step toward optimizing these newer manufacturing methods as they gear up for ever-larger production.
“The seemingly extravagant use of materials and energy resources by many newer manufacturing processes is alarming and needs to be addressed alongside claims of improved sustainability from products manufactured by these means,” Gutowksi and his colleagues say in their conclusion to the study, which was recently published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology (ES&T).
Gutowksi notes that manufacturers have traditionally been more concerned about factors like price, quality, or cycle time, and not as concerned over how much energy their manufacturing processes use. This latter issue will become more important, however, as the new industries scale up — especially if energy prices rise again or if a carbon tax is adopted, he says.
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Solar panels are a good example. Their production, which uses the same manufacturing processes as microchips but on a large scale, is escalating dramatically. The inherent inefficiency of current solar panel manufacturing methods could drastically reduce the technology’s lifecycle energy balance — that is, the ratio of the energy the panel would produce over its useful lifetime to the energy required to manufacture it.
The new study is just “the first step in doing something about it,” Gutowski says — understanding which processes are most inefficient and need further research to develop less energy-intensive alternatives. For example, many of the newer processes involve vapor-phase processing (such as sputtering, in which a material is vaporized in a vacuum chamber so that it deposits a coating on an exposed surface in that chamber), which is usually much less efficient than liquid phase (such as depositing a coating from a liquid solution), but liquid processing alternatives might be developed.
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The bottom line is that “new processes are huge users of materials and energy,” he says. Because some of these processes are so new, “they will be optimized and improved over time,” he says. But as things stand now, over the last several decades as traditional processes such as machining and casting have increasingly given way to newer ones for the production of semiconductors, MEMS and nano-materials and devices, for a given quantity of output “we have increased our energy and materials consumption by three to six orders of magnitude.”
One message from the study is that “claims that these technologies are going to save us in some way need closer scrutiny. There’s a significant energy cost involved here,” he says. And another is that “each of these processes could be improved,” and using the analytical tools developed by the MIT team for this study would be a useful first step in such a detailed analysis.
Let me try to boil my response down to a few observations:
- It makes absolutely no sense to compare anything except the production of goods that can substitute for one another. Microchips and manhole covers? I couldn’t care less. Tell me what we get in exchange for making those chips (or manhole covers), or show me different alternatives, such as better ways to make the same chips, better ways to make functionally equivalent chips, or ways to reorganize businesses that require fewer chips in the first place. But this kind of comparison is so crude that it’s meaningless.
- Of course manufacturers are concerned about price. And they always will be, too. All businesses measure things by money, whether it’s the cost of inputs and processes or the price of outputs. The only way you can change what companies do is to forbid/mandate them (essentially imposing a very high price for non-compliance), or create financial incentives for them to make more efficient cars or consume less electricity in their offices, or whatever. I had no trouble at all with society using incentives and regulation to alter the behavior of industries, as long as it’s done intelligently and based on solid information.
- The final graf I quoted above contains another one of those broad brushings I see all the time that makes my head spin around. All energy is not the same. Just like the microchips and manholes example from the first bullet above, lumping all energy consumption into a single cell in a spreadsheet is far too crude a measure.[1] It draws no distinction between a kWh produced by burning coal or oil and one produced by a wind or solar farm. Are we to believe that all of the differences we’d see in a total lifecycle analysis of those energy sources are insignificant?
[1] Once again, Albert Einstein comes to the rescue with his reminder to make things as simple as possible, but no simpler.
