IEN: What are the major power and energy concerns facing industry in the next few years? How can they be addressed?
Flieller: Biggest concerns are the availability of reliable power with minimal or no blackouts/brownouts. A repeat of the August blackout in the northeast is of great concern. Also, there is still the fear and uncertainty of the electrical utility deregulation. While it has been promoted as a major cost savings to the industrial customers due to open competition, few factories have seen their power bill lowered as a result of deregulation and all know about what happened in California several years ago.
IEN: What innovations in systems, equipment & components, software, and services can help reduce energy consumption and increase efficiency in plant operations?
Flieller: System monitoring, power quality products, and all products/systems that improve safety and reliability, reduce maintenance, reduce downtime, and extend the life of their capital purchases. Also those products and systems that can automate their processes, making them more efficient, and allow them to monitor and modify their highest power consumption equipment for use during lower power cost times.
IEN: What are the latest advances in audits, utility monitoring/analysis services, equipment diagnostics/maintenance, and HVAC retrofitting?
Flieller: Power monitoring devices and systems, system monitoring devices such as PowerRich, life-extending products such as vacuum retrofits, and upgrading of LV switchgear tripping and monitoring devices.
IEN: How about power supplies? Power quality?
Flieller: As stated above, reliable power, and those products that can help bring clean, quality, and reliable power are important. SVC, DVR, and power monitoring devices all come to mind.
IEN: What are some R & D hot spots?
Flieller: Those devices that can monitor equipment and identify areas for potential failure, prior to actual failure and the loss of power. Also any electrical equipment that can be made to run more efficiently with lower power consumption and lower first costs -- especially in the areas of transformers, motors, etc.
IEN: Will distributed generation/onsite power, cogeneration, fuel cell technology, and isolated power play an increased role in meeting industry''s power needs? How and when?
Flieller: Yes. With the various highly publicized blackouts and the press-reported shortage of power generation in many regions and at many of the electric utilities, the bigger industrial companies with heavy power consumption will look more and more to looking outside their normal electric utility for backup power. The recent blackouts and high electrical prices at peak times in some areas (i.e. California) are accelerating this. Depending on the size and sensitivity of their processes to poor power quality, this backup power will take many different forms, from onsite cogeneration to temporary "stop gap" solutions such as fuel cell technology, etc. For example, those processes that are very sensitive to downtime such as chip makers like Intel, and pharmaceutical research, are much more likely to spend significant dollars to insure that power quality issues do not interrupt their processes.