The third lecture of series “Electrical Energy Optimization” by IEEE Karachi Section was organized at DHA Sunset Club on 25th May 2016. Speaker for the session was Engineer Tahir Saleem, C.E.O of United Engineering Services and Vice President IEEEP (South). 35 years in electrical design, maintenance, instrumentation, energy audit, safety audit and technical trainings.
Mr Tahir Saleem discussed that currently our transmission lines are unable to withhold the load and the power that is being added to the system will take a lot of time. Therefore, he emphasized on importance of conserving energy and optimizing energy without hindering the primary goal of the project.
One of the major chunk of Electrical Power is consumed in lighting and we have seen people changing over to LED lamps and reducing the light load. The speaker focused that the energy need to be conserved without compromising on LUX level and quality of lights. He explained that many residential and commercial buildings are designed without maintaining the required LUX level. People tend to keep their stairways and passageways at high lux level and the rooms at lower just to create the ambiance. This is not only harmful for human eyes but also a waste of energy.
During the seminar, he also gave a practical demonstration using an android phone to calculate the lux level of the conference room at different point and as expected it was not maintained. He showed how easily a person can calculate the lux level of a room and make sure that proper lighting is achieved.
Moreover, he focused that industries in order to conserve energy focus on lighting. While only 15-20 % of energy is consumed in lighting of industry. It’s not always feasible to invest in new lighting system and changing over to LED lamps, because it has a very small impact on the bill.
Mr Saleem advised that we should focus on efficient and automatic control of lighting. He gave examples that at many work places, many lights are controlled just by a single switch. This leads to wastage of energy especially when only few people are working and the whole office is lit up. He also emphasized by automatic control of lighting such as automatic switching depended on the presence of human can be a very efficient way to conserve energy. He further advised to use efficient light fixtures and reflectors to make the most out of the lighting and explained how using inefficient fixtures for the sake of beautification leads to wastage of energy and also prevents achieving the required LUX level.
As the seminar proceeded on the speaker explained that the major chunk of electricity used in industries is for operating the motors. Most of the industries in Pakistan use over sized motors. The required torque by the industries is often low and are generally running at 50% of the load, which is quite inefficient and leads to huge energy wastage. Moreover, when motor gets old there efficiency decrease with time and often fixing them again and again lead to further decrease in efficiency. It is important that old ones should be replaced by new ones once they start consuming excessive power. One can easily calculate the consumption of efficiency using just the power meter and RPM meter to calculate the efficiency of motors.
Engineer Tahir Saleem focused on importance of the driving system of the motors. Effective control system should be implemented in the driver circuitry of the motors. Methods like VFD and HFMS should be implemented and Voltage optimization should be done. It is also important to maintain a voltage balance. Moreover, he explained when the required torque is low one can easily use lower voltages and save power by remaining in the tolerable limit.
The guest of the seminar appreciated the advises and information delivered during the seminar. It was also decided that people are given the awareness regarding energy conversation, efficiency and voltage optimization to not only reduce the cost but leading to a greener environment.