Early fault features of large-scale and low-speed mechanical equipment with heavy duty are weak and exhibit strong non-stationary characteristics. The adaptive extraction and identification of highly relevant important features from such signals has attracted significant attention. In this study, a novel empirical variational mode decomposition and exact Teager energy operator are proposed to explore valuable information. To highlight the fault impact signal representation, we use the exact energy operator to enhance the weak-impact components in the early fault signal. The proposed binary mechanism effectively distinguishes irrelevant features based on the adaptive decomposition parameter construction strategy. Therefore, interference features are easily removed from similar mixed signals, and the independent mode features are determined. The experimental results of the simulation and collected data are compared with those obtained with existing signal decomposition methods, and the superiority of the proposed method, owing to its better modal distinction and less time consumption, is verified.