WP6-Brochure-E4 brochure - ELA European Lift Association.

6 Estimation of Potential Savings
This chapter presents the results of the estimation of the electricity consumption of existing
lifts and escalators in Europe, as well as of the savings potential made possible by the use of
the best available technologies in the market today.
The characterisation of the installed base according to building type and basic characteristics
was made, as part of Work Package 2, by means of a survey conducted in cooperation with the
national member associations of the European Lift Association (ELA, presented in chapter 4).
Typical values for the electricity consumption of lifts are based on the monitoring campaign
carried out during this project (Work Package 3), in a number of selected buildings of the
residential, tertiary and industrial sectors, taking into consideration typical lift and escalator
technologies in use. A total of 81 equipments have been measured by the project’s partners
(ENEA, Fraunhofer‐ISI, KAPE and ISR‐UC) in the four countries concerned: Italy, Germany,
Poland, and Portugal.
With respect to the achieved values of potential savings, it is important to notice that:
• The initial cost of the technologies used, while being an important issue regarding their
application, has not been considered in this report; therefore, no indications are
provided about cost‐effectiveness of those technologies;
• Maintenance costs, such as labour and spare‐parts, have not been included in the
calculations, even if some of the electronic components in inverters (e.g. cooling fans,
capacitors, internal relays) ought to be periodically serviced in order to avoid
degradation in the inverter’s performance;
• Some technologies may increase stand‐by consumption while reducing consumption
during the running phase. Therefore, their application should be carefully evaluated on
a specific‐case basis.
6.1 Methodology for lifts
The proposed methodology is applied for each sector and for each of the main technologies
(hydraulic, geared traction, and gearless traction) used, consisting of four parts:
1. Determination of the average characteristics of the lifts used;
2. Estimation of the annual running energy consumption;
3. Estimation of the annual standby energy consumption;
4. Estimation of the potential savings by using the best available technologies in the
market.
The total values are then calculated by the aggregation of the sectoral values.
76