Every hour, our plant equipment quietly burns more power than it needs to — not through any single fault, but through dozens of small inefficiencies stacked across machines that have simply always run the way they were first installed. Team Shakti was formed to find those losses and eliminate them, with one clear target: cut plant power consumption by 500 KW per hour.
The team — led by M. Deelachary, with facilitator Narendra Agarwal — began by mapping power loads across every major area: the paper machines, pulp mill, evaporator, recovery section and utilities. What emerged was a pattern. Several motors, from MG blowers to exhaust fans, ran at fixed speed regardless of actual need, because they’d never been fitted with the sensors or controls to do otherwise. Vacuum pumps and cooling water pumps were burning extra power through outdated, low-efficiency designs. Even the plant’s own power generation was losing ground to a frequency mismatch and a low power factor.
Using root-cause analysis, the team traced each loss back to its source — much of it coming down to equipment installed for a different era of thinking, one where “always on, full speed” was the default.
The fixes now underway include installing VFDs and PLC-based controls so motors run only as fast as conditions demand, replacing inefficient pumps with better-designed ones, and correcting the plant’s power factor and generation frequency. Some changes are already delivering savings; others await approval or budget.
It’s a reminder that efficiency rarely arrives in one big leap — it’s built motor by motor, pump by pump.
