An Analytical Approach to Establish Specific Electrical Energy Consumption for Tea Factories in Sri Lanka
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Date
2013
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Publisher
Uva Wellassa University of Sri Lanka
Abstract
Tea industry is undoubtedly one of the most important industries with a substantial contribution
to the national economy in Sri Lanka. Tea industry utilizes energy in the forms of thermal
energy and electrical energy for its tea manufacturing process requirements.
Analyze values that can be used as standard values for the comparing performance of industries,
process, systems or equipments is essential to set the corresponding achievements. Average
value, best value and baseline for electrical energy consumption for tea industry is a vital
because the specific electricity consumption in terms of kWh per one kilogram of made tea is a
good measure of understanding the effectiveness of electricity utilization in the tea industry.
This research contributes to calculate the specific electrical energy consumption for tea factories
in Sri Lanka because the calculated value of the specific energy consumption between the tea
factories has large variation. There are 642 tea factories are operated in Sri Lanka. These tea
factories are situated up country, mid country and low country respectively. From those tea
factories 50 tea factories are taken as the sample size. From the above sample size about 25 tea
factories, data are collected from up country/ mid country tea factories and other 25 tea
factories, data collected from low country tea factories. Questionnaire survey was carried out for
collecting relevant data from the tea factories and gathered information on monthly and annual
made tea production (kg) and monthly and annual electricity consumption (kWh). Specific
electrical energy consumption (kWh per kilogram of made tea) was the calculated data. Minitab
software system was used to find out the best performance among a group of tea factories. The
calculated average value was 0.7856 kWh per one kilogram of made tea for specific electrical
energy consumption and it is named as the baseline of specific electrical energy consumption.
The best case of the specific electrical energy consumption is 0.4 kWh per one kilogram of
made tea. This calculated baseline for the specific electrical energy consumption allows the tea
factories to know precisely where their operation ranks in relation to a direct competitor, further
allowing it to identify major performance gap that need to be addressed through improved
energy efficiency.
Description
Keywords
Agriculture, Export Agriculture, Tea Industrials, Tea Technology, Energy