EU motor rules 'miss a trick'

London - The EU has agreed regulations requiring all motors - except for brake motors, those used at above 400°C and ATEX motors - to meet minimum efficiency standards. The regulations are based on the recently introduced IEC60034-30: 2008 harmonised standard for motor efficiency. (See story p13 for more details).

Under the rules, the EU will ban the sale of motors below standard IE2 efficiency by 2011 and will allow only highly efficient IE3 motors between 7.5-375kW, if single speed, from 2015 - expanding to a 0.75-375kW size range from 2017. However, IE2 motors can continue to be sold after 2015, if used with variable speed drives.

Welcoming the move as "probably the biggest thing to happen in the motor industry for some years," Steve Ruddell, ABB general manager, drives and motors (right), said the EU was at last joining other global regions in "driving towards a common global standard."

Nevertheless, the regulation appears to be a missed opportunity, according to Ruddell. For instance, he said, ABB would have liked to see the inclusion of motors above 375kW as well as many types of explosion-proofed motors.

While accepting the exclusion of Exe equipment, Ruddell said the regulators had "missed a trick" in excluding all other types of explosion-proof motors. These equate to about 10% of total motor population and, typically, run in continuous mode in energy-intensive industries such as chemicals and oil & gas.

Ruddell also cited concerns about whether motor rewinds would be allowed back into operation. As many as 11 million industrial motors, with a total capacity of 90GW, are installed in UK industry alone and a significant proportion of those that fail each day are rewound and then re-installed.

With full details of the EU regulation to be issued in June, Ruddell asked: Will the regulators be brave and scrap [rewinds]? We would like to see that motors that do not meet the appropriate efficiency class should not be allowed to be rewound and should be scrapped. This is the only way to quickly address the installed base."

Ruddell concluded by calling on the UK government to begin a high profile education campaign to inform industry about the need to meet the new energy efficiency requirements for motors ahead of the introduction of the EU regulations.

Please email your views to the editor: patrick.raleigh@centaur.co.uk