Industrial Energy Management Drills Down to the Core

Industrial energy management systems (IEMS) are helping to improve manufacturing operations, as decision-makers realize that energy efficiency can reduce costs and improve corporate sustainability performance at the same time. However, one of the greatest challenges in deploying IEMS is getting sufficient visibility to measure energy consumption at the level of the individual product or plant-floor asset.

In a recent presentation on industrial energy management, Matthew Littlefield, principal analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based LNS Research, spotlighted the value of IEMS as a means to achieve reductions in energy consumption, particularly for manufacturing firms. However, an LNS survey of manufacturing decision-makers found that companies are having trouble measuring energy consumption accurately.

“They may have high-level, broad-based utility consumption metrics, maybe by facility,” said Littlefield, “but very limited ability to drive that down to more decision-based metrics, where they can use that to make decisions on the energy side or [to understand] how that energy may contribute to production.”

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With nothing more than the power meter from the utility company, “the most you’re going to get is energy data by the building or by the plant,” stressed Gary Kohrt, vice president of solutions and services at energy-management software company ICONICS. “To really measure and reduce energy consumption, typically you need more resolution than that,” he said, speaking with ThomasNet News. “Getting more and more granular -- say, by the cell or by the production line or by major assets -- gives you increased ability to analyze things and make a difference.”

As an example, Kohrt says that his company is working with a large automotive manufacturer in the U.K. “that has 500 meters in their plant” and is “monitoring down to the level of the cell.” Combining this kind of fine-grained look with analytics software, said Kohrt, “lets you correlate energy use with a particular product. If you can measure it, you can improve it. Ten or 20 years ago, many plants just looked at energy as a part of overhead. Now they want to measure it as a direct cost.”

An IEMS solution, coupled with the deployment of meters on the shop floor, can provide not only visibility into energy consumption but also a greater frequency of checks -- even approaching real-time monitoring.

“Most of the meters available now have IP (Internet protocol) connectivity and work on open standards like OPC or Modbus,” said Kohrt. “If we have the IP address of the machine, we can bring data in all the way down to a one-second resolution, if we want to. That gives the manufacturer real-time access to the data, and then they can do anything they want with it.

“Just receiving the data and adding up the energy use is interesting but somewhat academic,” Kohrt noted. “What you really want is to know the root cause of your energy inefficiencies and how to improve them. The gain in all this -- what you ultimately want -- is to be able to look at energy as cost of goods sold, to correlate it down to this particular sheet of glass or whatever product you produce.”

This article was originally published on ThomasNet News Industry Market Trends  and is reprinted in its entirety with permission from Thomas Industrial Network.  For more stories like this please visit Industry Market Trends.