11 ms·

Koch is reducing energy consumption of AC Induction Motors by 1/3

35 points by bsinger98 7y ago

weare138 7y ago
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.
- dskhatri 7y ago
  Incorrect. They have done it: http://ackinetics.com/wp-content/uploads/AC-Kinetics-60Hp-Transient-Test-Report-final.pdf http://ackinetics.com/wp-content/uploads/AC-Kinetics-60Hp-Tr...
okintheory 7y ago
The Koch brothers hired private investigators to trail, intimidate, and attempt to get dirt on Jane Mayer when she was writing Dark Money -- a book about how they covertly funded ultra-right wingers and climate sceptics to protect their hundreds of billions of dollars of oil investments. Charles Koch literally shoulders a non-trivial amount of responsibility for a possible coming semi-apocalypse, and he makes plenty of movie villains look laughably tame in comparison. But this is a good step.
- okintheory 7y ago
  If you upvote me, I'll pay you! This is also something the Koch's do -- they fund many astroturfing groups, e.g. Citizens for a Sound Economy.
blattimwind 7y ago
Worth 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.
- _trampeltier 7y ago
  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.
fefe23 7y ago
Asking 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?
- rhexs 7y ago
  The Koch brothers are the left wing version of the boogeyman. See George Soros for the other side of fearmongering.
  - gameswithgo 7y ago
    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 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-a-climate-change-skeptic.html 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.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- peterwoerner 7y ago
  Yes.
- burlesona 7y ago
Faaak 7y ago
Seems like they installed variable frequency drives (their "algorithm) on their motors; nothing more.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  1/3 reduction is 1/3 reduction. It's worth doing, even if how they did it is no great breakthrough.
  - manicdee 7y ago
    Having 50% more consumption than the competitors is nothing to crow about. Great that they can claim 30% lower consumption, but that’s quite the spin to put on the story.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- dv_dt 7y ago
  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.
- exabrial 7y ago
  I was thinking the same thing. They're somehow sayin they're doing something on top of vector drive: http://ackinetics.com/?page_id=5115 http://ackinetics.com/?page_id=5115 . They claim a lot of lot efficiency with their algorithms: http://ackinetics.com/?page_id=5120 http://ackinetics.com/?page_id=5120
teabee89 7y ago
Reducing 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox and is quite an interesting topic.
- lrajlich 7y ago
  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.
Retric 7y ago
To 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.
- ars 7y ago
  But how big is that subset? If most motors run at constant power and speed, then that subset is small. But I suspect there are huge numbers that vary their load constantly, and don't come anywhere near 98% efficient.
hristov 7y ago
The 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.
paulyg 7y ago
The 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.
- dskhatri 7y ago
  No. AC Kinetics appears to offer significantly improved efficiencies over VFDs: http://ackinetics.com/wp-content/uploads/AC-Kinetics-60Hp-Transient-Test-Report-final.pdf http://ackinetics.com/wp-content/uploads/AC-Kinetics-60Hp-Tr...
Shivetya 7y ago
I 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
- robdachshund 7y ago
  You can "program" any motor via an MCU. All motors are "dumb" unless we are talking stepper motors, and even then they are still "dumb", just not even useful unless you have support hardware
baybal2 7y ago
Excuse me, but this is an utter bs for anybody minimally familiar with physics, let alone engineering. I have a feeling that Neil Singer gives off air of a scam artist
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
anonsivalley652 7y ago
The same company that poisons poor residents downstream in Crosset, AK and subverts democracy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_Brothers_Exposed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_Brothers_Exposed

35 points by bsinger98 7y ago

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.

dskhatri 7y ago
Incorrect. They have done it: http://ackinetics.com/wp-content/uploads/AC-Kinetics-60Hp-Transient-Test-Report-final.pdf http://ackinetics.com/wp-content/uploads/AC-Kinetics-60Hp-Tr...

okintheory 7y ago

The Koch brothers hired private investigators to trail, intimidate, and attempt to get dirt on Jane Mayer when she was writing Dark Money -- a book about how they covertly funded ultra-right wingers and climate sceptics to protect their hundreds of billions of dollars of oil investments. Charles Koch literally shoulders a non-trivial amount of responsibility for a possible coming semi-apocalypse, and he makes plenty of movie villains look laughably tame in comparison. But this is a good step.

okintheory 7y ago
If you upvote me, I'll pay you! This is also something the Koch's do -- they fund many astroturfing groups, e.g. Citizens for a Sound Economy.

blattimwind 7y ago

Worth 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.

_trampeltier 7y ago
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.

fefe23 7y ago

Asking 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?

rhexs 7y ago
The Koch brothers are the left wing version of the boogeyman. See George Soros for the other side of fearmongering.
- gameswithgo 7y ago
  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 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-a-climate-change-skeptic.html 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.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
peterwoerner 7y ago
Yes.
burlesona 7y ago

Faaak 7y ago

Seems like they installed variable frequency drives (their "algorithm) on their motors; nothing more.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
1/3 reduction is 1/3 reduction. It's worth doing, even if how they did it is no great breakthrough.
- manicdee 7y ago
  Having 50% more consumption than the competitors is nothing to crow about. Great that they can claim 30% lower consumption, but that’s quite the spin to put on the story.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dv_dt 7y ago
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.
exabrial 7y ago
I was thinking the same thing. They're somehow sayin they're doing something on top of vector drive: http://ackinetics.com/?page_id=5115 http://ackinetics.com/?page_id=5115 . They claim a lot of lot efficiency with their algorithms: http://ackinetics.com/?page_id=5120 http://ackinetics.com/?page_id=5120

teabee89 7y ago

Reducing 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox and is quite an interesting topic.

lrajlich 7y ago
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.

Retric 7y ago

To 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.

ars 7y ago
But how big is that subset? If most motors run at constant power and speed, then that subset is small. But I suspect there are huge numbers that vary their load constantly, and don't come anywhere near 98% efficient.

hristov 7y ago

The 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.

paulyg 7y ago

The 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.

dskhatri 7y ago
No. AC Kinetics appears to offer significantly improved efficiencies over VFDs: http://ackinetics.com/wp-content/uploads/AC-Kinetics-60Hp-Transient-Test-Report-final.pdf http://ackinetics.com/wp-content/uploads/AC-Kinetics-60Hp-Tr...

Shivetya 7y ago

I 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

robdachshund 7y ago
You can "program" any motor via an MCU. All motors are "dumb" unless we are talking stepper motors, and even then they are still "dumb", just not even useful unless you have support hardware

baybal2 7y ago

Excuse me, but this is an utter bs for anybody minimally familiar with physics, let alone engineering. I have a feeling that Neil Singer gives off air of a scam artist

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

anonsivalley652 7y ago

The same company that poisons poor residents downstream in Crosset, AK and subverts democracy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_Brothers_Exposed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_Brothers_Exposed