Complex Process and Electrical Energy Management

The Challenge

The customer has multiple process plants within the campus, each catered to by common utilities such as compressed air, dry air, steam, potable water, chilled and cooling water, and electricity. Each process plant operates as a cost and profit center. It was essential for the customer to determine the energy conversion cost to ascertain actual production costs. All plant heads were required to meet monthly for a couple of days to discuss and debate each plant’s energy consumption. These meetings were unfriendly, stressful, and did not yield accurate energy consumption figures, only assumed values based on discussions. To overcome this long-standing issue, the customer decided to implement an energy management system. 

The Solution

• Identifying input branch points for each type of utility for all plants. These points were converted into measuring points using high precision instruments.
  
• Deploying magnetic flow meters, mass flow meters, pressure transmitters, temperature sensors, and level transmitters based on application demands.
• Utilizing high precision multifunction meters for electrical energy measurement at all critical points.
• Implementing Siemens RTUs to connect instrumentation with the main system.
• The main system was a Siemens PCS7 distributed control system with hot redundancy for high availability and two operator stations.
• Establishing a dedicated fiber optic network throughout the campus to connect various RTUs with the main system.
• Once deployed, the system started generating reports that precisely indicated energy usage by each plant.