UK manufacturers lose up to £408m a year to idle energy use

FourJaw has calculated that UK manufacturers have lost up to £408 million in 2025 by failing to power down machines when their factories are closed.

FourJaw’s analysis, which draws on its machine monitoring data and sources including the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero, indicates that machinery left idling by UK manufacturers when not in use wastes up to 1.8 TWh (1.8 billion kWh) of electricity each year. This accounts for about 0.64% of UK electricity usage and is enough to power approximately 500,000 homes for a year.

FourJaw believes that the failure to isolate machinery between shifts is a major cause of wasted energy in UK factories. The analysis shows that the issue primarily affects around 180,000 small and medium-sized manufacturers operating single-shift production schedules without an off-shift switch-off policy.

The scale of this challenge has increased for UK manufacturers, who pay around twice the EU average price for energy. FourJaw estimates that UK manufacturers will spend £14.7 billion on electricity in 2025, with more than half of consumption used to power production machinery.

Chris Iveson, CEO of FourJaw Manufacturing Analytics, comments: “Traditionally, manufacturers left machines idling off-shift because they considered it better than powering them off and on again. This approach is wasteful when applied to all machinery, particularly given high energy costs now.

“Most large manufacturers have implemented systems to monitor machine-level consumption that allow them to compare the cost of a warm-up run with several hours of idling and take the most cost-effective and sustainable course of action. 

“But it is SME manufacturers running single-shift operations that have most to gain from powering down machinery when not in use. Idling energy use may seem small, but at a typical 50 kWh per machine per week in a single-shift factory, that’s £450 in unnecessary spend per machine per year.

“New regulations compelling manufacturers to calculate per-unit carbon emissions have driven the use of machine-level productivity and energy data. We see manufacturers using this data to inform how they manage machines off-shift and making big savings and sustainability gains doing so.”

fourjaw.com