A Study on Electric Energy Consumption of Manufacturing Companies in the German Industry with the Focus on Electric Drives

Abstract The German industry consumes almost 50 percent of the total electricity produced in Germany. Upon breaking down the industry in terms of electrical energy consumption, it is shown that more than 70 percent of electricity, required in the industry, is used to operate electric drives. Given the huge rise in energy prices, especially in Germany, coupled with the lack of information and data on electric motors, the need to make the power consumption of electric drives transparent became more important than ever. This paper concentrates on the investigation of the electricity consumption of electric drives in the manufacturing plants. The focus lies on the various industrial applications of electric drives along with the identification of the main electric power consumers in the German industry. In order to create transparency regarding the energy consumption, a study was carried out in the second quartile of 2014. A number of randomly selected German manufacturing companies were sent an online questionnaire. After eliminating the incomplete answers, 210 answers were used as the database. The study on the real distribution of electric power consumption in the German manufacturing industry is presented for the first time in this paper. The study shows that most of electric power consumption can be allocated to a few applications in the industry. The dominant applications are compressed air systems, pumping systems and air conditioning systems. Other significant motor applications are cooling systems and machine tool. This paper rounds off by presenting the main study results as well as future research potential examined during this investigation.