Koch is reducing energy consumption of AC Induction Motors by 1/3 | Hacker News Reader

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

news.kochind.com

35 pointsbsinger9825 comments

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.

Incorrect. They have done it: http://ackinetics.com/wp-content/uploads/AC-Kinetics-60Hp-Tr...

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?

The Koch brothers are complicated. I found the Freakonomics interview with them very interesting: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-hate-koch-brothers-part...

The most interesting quote (from part 2 of the interview):

> Charles Koch argues that the biggest threats to America these days are special interests, cronyism, and corporate welfare. Which may seem strange if you think of a corporate CEO, like Koch, as a beneficiary of those things. He also argues that our political system has turned into a dumpster fire, with both parties guilty of rent-seeking and putting their thumbs on whatever scales they can find. Which may also strike you as strange, if you consider that what a political network like the Koch Brothers’ network does is — well, puts its thumb on the scale. Because he primarily funds Republicans, and because so much of that funding is “dark,” anonymous money, he is seen by most Democrats as something close to the devil — even though some of his positions, as you’ll hear today, align quite snugly with traditional liberal positions.

> My overall impression from speaking with him? Charles Koch believes he’s fighting the good fight based on proven principles — and that the rest of America has been going mad, bit by bit.

Yes.

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

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.

1/3 reduction is 1/3 reduction. It's worth doing, even if how they did it is no great breakthrough.

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.

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 . They claim a lot of lot efficiency with their algorithms: http://ackinetics.com/?page_id=5120

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

No. AC Kinetics appears to offer significantly improved efficiencies over VFDs: http://ackinetics.com/wp-content/uploads/AC-Kinetics-60Hp-Tr...

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 and is quite an interesting topic.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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