When you’re heading down the escalators at the
Bellagio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, you’re riding in style. The property is
among the glitziest in Sin City, and, most likely, that escalator ride is
packed with an international line-up of high-rollers ready to lay down
literally thousands of dollars in a night.
Unfortunately for the Bellagio and its legendary
owner, Steve Wynn, the property itself was leaving thousands of dollars on the
table, with respect to wasted escalator-related energy costs. Here’s why: It
takes the same amount of juice to run an escalator whether it’s carrying two
people or twenty. And with an estimated 400,000 escalators in operation
worldwide, the power bill to run these machines amounts to $260 million a year,
according to published estimates.
The waste extends beyond escalators to other machines
-- like elevators and conveyor belts -- creating what may be one of the greatest
contributors to the carbon-footprint puzzle. That’s right: With all the focus
on solar power, electric cars, wind-generation farms, and other efforts to cut
on power consumption, very little attention is paid to equipment dependent upon
motors that run at maximum capacity when minimum is needed.
Until now.
A company called Power Efficiency worked
with the folks at Bellagio as well as the resort’s next-door neighbor, Caesar's
Palace (owned by Harrah’s Entertainment), to sharply reduce the amount of
energy consumed by these escalators. Power Efficiency came up with what it
calls "motor-efficiency controllers," which essentially allow for a "smart"
motor that increases and decreases loads based upon real-time demand among the
users of escalators, elevators, crushers, shredders, conveyors and other
equipment products that depend upon them.
Dubbed the "E-Save Technology"
solution line, the controllers use a microprocessor and circuitry to sense the
energy requirements of a motor -- controlling the amount of power delivered to
the motor based upon the load requirements -- while maintaining constant motor
speed. This eliminates "full-load" runs when full loads aren’t on board.
A test run at Caesar's Palace demonstrated an energy
reduction of more than 35 percent, which would save more than $1,500 per year for each
escalator using the controllers. The Bellagio reported similar results. Other
customers using the technology include Macy’s, Mitsubishi, Borders, Boston
Logan International Airport, the Los Angeles Metro Transit Authority, the
Smithsonian and Yankee Stadium.
“Energy efficiency is the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of
energy solutions,” says Steven Strasser, chairman and CEO of Power
Efficiency. “In developing this line of products, we recognize a simple
fact: It’s
much less expensive, destructive, and time-intensive to reduce energy
demand
through efficiency than to increase energy supply through new power
plants and
transmission lines.”
