In Industrial Manufacturing, Efficiency Falls as Technology Advances

A study of manufacturing processes shows that more advanced technologies are less energy efficient

A century ago, industrial manufacturing was dominated by large-scale, energy-hungry processes such as smelting ores and machining metals. Today, the industrial landscape features an array of novel techniques operating on much smaller scales, making computer chips, carbon nanofibers, and other sophisticated products. That evolution toward more technologically advanced manufacturing has happened, a new study shows, at the cost of a sharp decrease in efficiency. The most hi-tech processes can take as much as a million times more energy and materials to make a given quantity of finished product than traditional industrial methods–a trend that may hinder efforts to build a more energy-conscious industrial economy using cutting-edge materials and technology.

With the exception of the methods that involved melting metal, the overall power requirements for each process were surprisingly similar, ranging from about 5 to 50 kilowatts of electricity. On the other hand, the amounts of material processed varied enormously, ranging from hundreds of kilograms per hour or more for the older processes to just a few milligrams per hour for two of the most novel techniques. A striking trend emerged: as processes become more technologically sophisticated, they tend to manipulate smaller and smaller quantities of material at slower rates, but since power consumption per process has stayed about the same, the amount of energy needed to generate a given quantity of finished product has been growing fast.

US News & World Report