Energy Monitoring System Improves Visibility
Published on : Monday 30-11--0001
Less than 20 years later, additional factories and a research center opened, creating a complete business operating system consisting of research, manufacturing and sales.
Local teams successfully brought the parent company’s wide variety of brands to local consumers.
In 1999, the company integrated manufacturing capabilities. While the factories operated well independently, the integration – and additional environmental regulations – made it apparent that the customer required a more efficient energy monitoring solution.
Challenge
Improved awareness of and visibility to energy resourced data is the foundation for any strategic energy management application. This global manufacturer realized the importance of understanding where, when and how it utilized energy before and the need to:
- Establish the scope of energy savings efforts.
- Define key metrics.
- Put the appropriate measures in place.
By integrating energy and production information, the company wanted to gain better insight into how energy influences the bottom line, and also how energy improvements can ultimately help to improve production.
The manufacturer needed a monitoring system that could gather data from every energy source – electricity, natural gas and steam – and transfer that information to a database that can be managed by minutes or demand period. They also required a system that could allow operators to utilize or process data, take advantage of automatic alerts for selected trends.
The customer identified three priorities for Rockwell Automation:
- Based on the ISO50001 energy management standard, the system should provide systematic energy data that can be contextualized to numbers and visible. This enables operators to proactively manage energy utilization and respond immediately to exceptional trends.
- Manage energy utilization based on real-time monitoring and realize actual savings through automatic data collection versus meter reading.
- Easily cope with government energy policies by reporting energy utilization and lower carbon dioxide emissions, also enhancing the company’s reputation for eco-friendly operations.
In addition, the customer expected to have this newly installed solution in all facilities in Korea to share real-time operational data regardless of location and time.
Solution
The result was an Energy Monitoring System based on the FactoryTalk® software suite. The software integrates directly with the Rockwell Automation Logix control platform to access real-time energy data.
For a graphic display of the factory floor, the manufacturer used FactoryTalk® View Site Edition andFactoryTalk® ViewPoint. This human-machine interface (HMI) software with a redundant server provides a comprehensive and accurate view into electricity and energy usage data, delivering efficiency in plant-floor operation and web client management.
The information from the controller is fed to the FactoryTalk® VantagePoint® Energy portal, which offers advanced reporting and analytics on data, converting raw numbers into shareable dashboards with actionable information.
Trend reports developed with this information allow operators to set the system to respond automatically. Additionally, with this capability, operators can aggregate metered energy/consumption data with production assets throughout the factory to start monitoring energy utilization. Correlating energy with production information allows people to make more informed decisions regarding equipment and production – ultimately resulting in lower energy costs and improved production.
With FactoryTalk® VantagePoint® Energy, the focus is on driving the measured energy usage at the main and sub-station level and distributing it as energy consumption across the enterprise. Operators can manually adjust any of the systems from the control room or a local station if they see a sudden fluctuation in energy utilization or an unpredicted event.
To improve visibility and pull actionable energy data from the control system, the engineers usedFactoryTalk® Historian software, which collects up to 10,000 data tags from programmable logic controllers (PLCs) per line. Metrics include station temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide concentration and other environmental data.
The facilities use the Allen-Bradley® ControlLogix® L71 with about 100,000 I/O points across different stations. A typical station includes two pairs of PLCs as communication controllers to pull and aggregate data from different devices.
The facilities also installed several Allen-Bradley switches. The Stratix 5400™ industrial managed switch supports layer 2 switching and layer 3 routing, which enhance scalability and increase versatility with the ability to support multiple network configurations. The Stratix® 5700 compact, layer2 managed switch, embedded with Cisco technology, enables the operators to leverage FactoryTalk® View faceplates and Add-on Profiles for simplified configuration and monitoring.
With the Stratix® 2000 line of unmanaged switches, operators were able to get copper and fiber (SFP) ports with 100 MB or 1 Gb speeds for increased network flexibility and performance. This switch offered an industrial-grade enclosure with an IP-30 rating and extended temperature range for enhanced environmental protection, allowing “plug-and-play” operation for quick and easy integration.
Utilizing energy metered data from sources such as the PowerMonitor™500 provided greater insight into energy consumption across the plant floor and enterprise-wide. It allowed operators to view energy data directly at the monitoring site without additional HMI components. The display provided instant and accurate sub-metering data to keep operators well-informed about power usage, major loads and peak power time. With its compact, space-saving design, PowerMonitor 500 is a cost-effective sub-metering option, providing critical data that helped operators make at-process decisions, reduced energy usage and increased company’s profit.
Results
After implementing the FactoryTalk software suite on top of the system architecture, operators increased visibility into operations across the entire system. With the ability to adjust system performance based on various trends, the customer projects an annual reduction in energy usage of approximately 10 percent.
Additionally, operators are enjoying more convenient, useful reports, dashboards and KPIs from a solution that can now provide information for energy and cost savings throughout the plants.
The results mentioned above are specific to this customer’s use of Rockwell Automation products and services in conjunction with other products. Specific results may vary for other customers.
Allen-Bradley, ControlLogix, FactoryTalk, FactoryTalk VantagePoint, FactoryTalk Site Edition, PowerMonitor, Rockwe4ll Automation and Stratix are trademarks of Rockwell Automation Inc.