In this month’s Technical Forum, Dr Michael Clark considers how to reduce electricity costs by looking at how much is consumed and ways to lower the price of energy. While this is less of an issue in countries with low electricity costs, the lack of incentive to reduce costs could be a different kind of problem.
The cost of something is a function of the price paid and the amount purchased or consumed. It is obvious, but there are many ways in which this shapes what happens on a cement factory and in the cement industry.
Figure 1 comes from one of Whitehopleman’s cement factory cost benchmarking reports and illustrates this relationship by looking at the electricity cost of grinding cement. The cement factory being benchmarked has high unit electricity costs of US$0.12/kWh. This is in the upper quartile of electricity costs, but the factory combats this with a low specific electricity consumption of 34.15kWh/t of ground cement. This is in the lower quartile of unit electricity consumption for cement grinding in the Whitehopleman benchmarking database. However, the combination of the electricity price paid and the consumption of electricity means that the unit cost for grinding cement of US$4.10/t is well above the median of cement factories.
