Energy Saving Fans-In Nation’s and Customer’s interest

BEE Star rating program gets support from industry Body

BEE’s mandatory Star rating program from January 2023 is indeed a great step to support the fan industry to produce only those fans which are energy efficient. Along with the nations interest in saving precious energy and being environmentally friendly, it will bring huge recurring savings to the customers. Such programs introduced in other appliances have brought smiles on the faces of customers for their savings.

Amongst the different ratings the 5 star is ranked as most efficient and currently this is possible only by employing the BLDC motors in them. What is BLDC motor technology –How it is more efficient? For this see another blog dated …..

How much energy can the Nation save by switching to BLDC fans?
Plenty. Unimaginable. Let us put it straight first. It will be around 120 TWh every year. To write simply it is Terawatts or 1.20 Lacs Giga watts. Impressed. Of course the total changeover to the BLDC fans may take few years but progressively the savings will happen culminating to total of this.

Let us mathematically calculate for you.

Total households in India is close to 20 crores (source: 2011 Govt data). With a growth of 20% (Historical average), total households in 2021 should be close to 24 crores. Market Penetration of fans is close to 84%, which means close to 20 crores households have fans installed. Research shows an average of 3 fans in a household, so a total of 60 crores ceiling fans are in use in Indian households.

Then there is a huge segment of Bulk Users like Hospitals, Institutions, Temples, Armed Forces, Offices, commercial and Industry establishments etc . These can be estimated at about 20% of  ceiling fans used in households. This means around 12 crores more fans in use thus bringing to total 72 crore fans.

At least 50% of these fans are real power guzzlers—as they are either decades old or of low cot low energy efficiency.

If all these fans are replaced with a typical BLDC fan, which of course will take few years depending upon various industry /customer factors, the end of the tunnel saving on all these will be about 50W per fan or say by 36 GWh of energy per hour.

Now, to calculate the amount of energy our country can save by switching to BLDC, we need to make one assumption (which is also known to us from common knowledge). Firstly, in a typical household, a fan runs for at least 12 hours a day for about 10 months or 300 days a year (In South India fan runs almost all year; in East and West India a fan runs for almost 10 months and barring few parts in Northern India, fan runs about 8 months a year). Considering this assumption and doing our maths we can arrive at the total energy saved per year if we switch to BLDC fan. This number would be close to 108 TWh. When we do a similar calculation for institutions, we find that these institutions can save upto 27 TWh of energy per year if they switch to BLDC motor fans. So in total, the institutions and households can together help India conserve up to 135 TWh of energy.

Conclusion

The Government of India and the supporting Industries do understand that adoption of Energy Efficient products is the need of the hour. It will save hundreds of crores of rupees for not needing new generation and distribution initiatives .Precisely the reason why energy efficient LED lights have seen such rapid adoption replacing the age old tube lights.

The next decade would see a massive transformation in the ceiling fan category and will be huge collective contribution of the various fan industries towards the new green India.

(more…)