Home / Insights

Notes from the plant floor.

Industry analysis on industrial efficiency, energy accountability, power quality, smart factories and the engineering decisions that compound across operating periods.

JOURNAL
Recent

From the journal.

Practical engineering writing for plant operators, facility leaders and energy managers.

2026 · 04 · 22

Why your power factor penalty isn't really about power factor.

The most common misdiagnosis we see — and what the demand-charge data actually tells you about plant behaviour.

Read · 6 min →
2026 · 03 · 15

Sub-metering ROI: the three rules that make it actually pay back.

Most metering deployments underperform because the engineering brief was wrong. Three principles that change the maths.

Read · 8 min →
2026 · 02 · 28

Hybrid power for telecom: where the diesel still wins.

Solar-diesel-battery economics are not always what the configurator says. Honest analysis of when the old architecture is still the right one.

Read · 10 min →
2026 · 02 · 04

Compressed air: the most expensive utility nobody measures.

Why compressed air systems leak 20–30% by default — and what a one-day audit can recover in operating cost.

Read · 7 min →
2026 · 01 · 18

Voltage instability and the engineering we owe our motors.

How the African grid actually behaves — and the design factors that prevent the slow, expensive equipment failures it causes.

Read · 9 min →
2025 · 12 · 09

A short defence of the boring audit.

The unglamorous walk-through, meter-by-meter, that consistently outperforms the AI-powered platform in our project records.

Read · 5 min →

Want our analysis on a specific problem?

Subscribe for new analysis, or send us the question your operations team is wrestling with. We'll write the answer publicly when it's useful to others.

Get in Touch