Building automation advancements have provided facility managers
greater visibility of actionable energy data. With robust plant networks and
smarter devices, can manufacturers learn lessons and apply better asset
management practices?
Finding and leveraging
energy savings in commercial buildings has accelerated over the past 10-15
years largely because of modern building automation systems (BAS) and the
BACnet standard development in the U.S. and globally. Direct digital control
(DDC) has kicked pneumatic control systems to the curb, and energy data is now
readily presented to facility managers, bringing noticeable energy savings for
larger companies.
Modern BAS and energy
management systems (EMS), along with the proliferation of room and zone
monitoring via sensors in modern or retrofitted buildings, present facility
managers with opportunities most did not have 20 years ago—namely, through
actionable data.
However, best-in-class manufacturers are already roadmapping plant strategies that include much more data from the shop floor. So when does energy management become part of the discussion?Is there an opportunity for manufacturers to leverage the BAS and EMS strategies used in the building space? Compared with building automation, it’s fair to say manufacturers are presented with different types of energy saving challenges because of unique and varied industry applications and manufacturing footprints. For years, electricity costs have been viewed as a fixed cost in the operations world, with building management usually not in the discussion.
Where to start?
“We recommend the
top-down approach over a period of time, where we tell manufacturers and
building managers to start with your main building profile,” says Arun Sinha,
director of business development at Opto 22. “Monitor, learn
and find anomalies in energy footprint.”
Building control is
quite uniform. BAS resides as software on an operator workstation or is
available as a web page, while various controller types manage equipment and
portions of the network. Meanwhile, zone sensors provide input data to the
controllers. All of this is done through a BACnet communication protocol, ANSI
certified, or on a LonWorks network. Monitoring at the subpanel level allows
for motion sensing and automated lighting schedules to conserve energy when
rooms are empty.
However, the inherent
variety of manufacturing applications and control architectures does not allow
for a simple plug-and-play handbook for industrial energy monitoring. For
example, warehouses or refrigerated storage facilities may lean on a
traditional automation system to control compressors and chillers for heating,
ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) and production equipment. These
applications include control and monitoring.
“If we’re in the boiler
room and there’s 10 energy loads right in the same room with chillers, boilers,
pump and circulation pumps, then I’d say it’s better to use a programmable
automation controller (PAC) system,” Sinha says.
Energy, a fixed cost?
A particularly
challenging aspect of industrial energy management is ownership by operations.
Energy management or the cost of electricity has mostly been viewed as a fixed
cost, with plant operations focused on meeting output and continuous
improvement.
“Historically,
production people really haven’t had the resources to look at energy monitoring
because 15 different machines on the plant floor have different load requirements
and demands, and it was just overwhelming to try to have a production manager
really think about energy management," says Doug Ferguson, vice president
of Americas Operations Services for Phoenix Contact.
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However, that’s changing
as more equipment data moves from the plant floor to third-party energy
management software solutions.
“The current trend we’re
seeing is a lot of the building automation companies, hardware vendors and the
energy management application providers for standard commercial buildings move
into the manufacturing space,” says Erik Dellinger, product manager
for Internet of Things solutions at Kepware Technologies. The
systems they provide often export energy data via XML from conveyor motors via
OPC communication drivers into the cloud or energy dashboards for real-time
visibility.
Seeing energy data is
not a problem. “There’s a lot of options now,” Sinha says. “A lot of companies
have emerged offering cloud-based visualization systems that are very easy to
use.”
There are numerous
third-party energy integrators with dashboard solutions, such as Pulse Energy
and eSight Energy, but automation suppliers are in this space too. Siemens andSchneider Electric, for example, both offer cloudbased
software with vertical integration of building and automation systems to
manufacturers, aiding in business intelligence strategies for larger
organizations.
Studying energy loads
One company taking a
holistic approach to energy use in manufacturing, while updating its building
controls systems with DDC, is automotive engine manufacturer Cummins.
The company has been working with its local utility, Duke Energy,
to better see the energy loads at its Rocky Mount, N.C., manufacturing
facility.
The 1.2 million square
foot facility makes about 150,000 engines a year, and compressed air—used to
blow off chips from machining the engine blocks and heads—is a major energy
factor. Some characterize compressed air as the fourth utility for industrial
manufacturers, after electricity, gas and water. For Cummins, there’s no
question about its importance.
At the Rocky Mount
plant, Duke Energy helped design an energy management system that ties into the
company’s existing building management system, where it looks at the cubic feet
per minute (CFM) of compressed air used per engine line. The company has a
dedicated staff watching air compressors in real time and compiling data logs
of energy loads. About 12 main compressed air drops within the plant are
metered.
“Rocky Mount is
compressing about 20,000 CFM. It is the largest energy-consuming system within
our plant,” says Mark VanDam, facilities engineer at Cummins’ Rocky Mount
plant. “It accounts for about 25 percent of the electrical energy we use on a
daily basis to compress air.”
At the Rocky Mount
plant, they’re trying to pinpoint leaks or other equipment problems that could
drive compressed air use up, VanDam says. “That data is logged every 15 minutes
and then it logs the average every 15 minutes for us to see.”
Cummins is developing
its own energy dashboard that drills down to plant floor lines to provide data
for more Six Sigma improvements. “We’ll be able to give each individual
business unit within the plant a CFM per part that they produce—basically, a measure
so they can understand whether their usage is going up or down per part, and
drive our energy cost down,” VanDam says. “We’re up to six different Six Sigma
projects now, and there is a total savings of about $135,000 annually based on
straight energy savings, including electrical energy as well as compressed air
savings.”
Rocky Mount isn’t the
only Cummins plant moving toward better energy visualization. The engine plant
in Jamestown, N.Y., is at the end of a five-year plan to retrofit its entire
building management system that will support a BACnet open architecture.
Similar to Rocky Mount, compressed air use makes up about 20 percent of the
plant’s electricity use.
“At Jamestown, there are
three shift operations, but second shift is a maintenance shift. So one of the
things we look at is to make sure that our load drops proportionally when
production goes home for the second shift,” says David Burlee, plant
engineering leader at the Jamestown facility. “With our metering program, we’re
able to see a lot of things that we didn’t know existed around energy waste,
particularly if the lines or areas are not working.”
Asset management
Data coming from the
shop floor can lead to energy savings, certainly, but it can also provide
equipment insights or better asset management practices. One opportunity comes
from looking at power quality on the factory floor. Poor power quality
management can increase power usage and damage devices, such as electrical
motors, computers and industrial control equipment.
Three-phase power
modules are a common solution and they monitor energy behavior for motors,
production lines and motor control centers while transmitting data using
industrial protocol standards such as Profibus, EtherNet/IP, CANopen and
others.
The modules measure
active, reactive and apparent power, total power consumption, power factors and
phase shift angles, to name a few.
More importantly, energy
data is just a dashboard away. “Our three-phase power measurement modules have
an energy management dashboard that provides the engineer or technician with a
quick view of the energy use of the system,” says Charlie Norz product manager
at Wago.
Energy use at the device
level is providing more real-time energy data, but networking solutions also
allow plant managers to view bigger plant energy consumption patterns. For
example, recent energy profile developments with Profinet and EtherNet/IP
provide manufacturers with easier access to a bigger systems view.
The ProfiEnergy
communication profile can transmit power demand information back to the
controller to support more sophisticated energy savings strategies, including
peak load management. Specific examples of peak load management include energy
savings during brief and longer production pauses, and unscheduled downtime.
A white paper from ODVA called
“CIP Energy Profiles” discusses the importance of a bigger view—a top-down
approach—afforded by industrial networks. “Some devices may report very
accurate energy data, but high accuracy is not really needed at the device
level. There will usually be revenue-accurate meters upstream in the energy
distribution network,” the paper notes. “This more complete energy picture provides
valuable information on the energy behavior of a machine, zone, line or area,
allowing users to make decisions that result in reduced energy usage and cost.”
