MIT: Alarming energy use in emerging industries

A new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says modern manufacturing systems are energy hogs, using between 1,000 and 1 million times the energy of traditional manufacturing to produce the same amount of output.

The study by Professor Timothy Gutowski of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering compares the energy use per pound of output of 20 manufacturing processes.

The study casts light on the soup-to-nuts energy consumption of clean technologies such as solar panels. Solar was singled out in the study as being extremely energy inefficient, detracting from the technology's lifecycle energy balance (the energy it takes to produce versus the energy it can generate).

“Claims that these technologies are going to save us in some way need closer scrutiny. There’s a significant energy cost involved here,” Gutowski said in a news release. “Each of these processes could be improved.”

The study is comparing widely disparate methods and end products, but Gutowski said the results still have resonance. Cleantech needs to improve the energy efficiency of its processes before ramping production, he said. Liquid phase processing, for example, has the potential to be a more energy efficient solution if it's further developed.

“The seemingly extravagant use of materials and energy resources by many newer manufacturing processes is alarming and needs to be addressed alongside claims of improved sustainability from products manufactured by these means,” Gutowksi wrote in the study.

The work, funded by the National Science Foundation, was just published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.