Imagine for a moment this idyllic situation; you buy shares in a company where the return is guaranteed. People would queue up to invest their money in this new, risk free, stock market. Although such utopian circumstances don’t apply to the FTSE, they do apply to variable speed drives (VSDs). However, there isn’t a queue to buy these devices; perhaps because of a lack of understanding of the ROI they deliver.
Installing a variable speed drive is the closest thing industry has to signing up for free money. They can reduce the energy bill on your application or system by more than the capital cost in a relatively short period. Furthermore, like our utopian stocks a VSD will pay yearly dividends - in the form of reduced energy bills. As energy prices continue to soar, the ROI on a VSD application increases in proportion to the bill. (Although I’m sure we would rather just keep the bills low.)
Perhaps greater awareness is required? Perhaps engineers should pay closer attention to the lifetime cost, including energy, of a system, rather than just its capital cost? Or perhaps finance and purchasing teams need to be made aware of what engineers already know – that VSDs are the lowest risk investment UK plc can make to bring its environmental and economic goals a step closer to fruition.
