Driving an efficient enterprise

With industry consuming over 31% of the world’s energy, businesses are becoming more aware of the need to produce more whilst using less energy. Companies of all sizes are integrating energy management systems into their organizations to improve their bottom line, competitiveness and compliance, while minimizing the impact on the environment.

Effective energy management is achieved through proper identification of challenges and then turning the challenges into useful opportunities through strategized mitigation plans with several key options for different approaches. With integration of energy and operation management systems, the same can be obtained.

Csepel Wastewater Treatment Plant
By effectively deploying an integrated energy management system, Csepel Wastewater Treatment Plant was able to boost productivity by 76%. Located in Budapest, Hungary, Csepel is the largest facility of its kind in the European Union with a capacity of 350,000 m3/day. To comply with the 1994 Sophia Convention, and to standards established by the EU, the plant partnered with Schneider Electric to take on the full responsibility of process and energy management.
The tailored energy management solution allowed Caspel to reach 95% of wastewater treated instead of 54%. The new wastewater treatment plant allows for energy efficiency, at the same time reducing design cost by 15%.

Taking a Structured Approach
Efforts to improve energy management require a combination of different approaches. These include focusing on improving efficiencies of the installed physical assets themselves, changing energy usage patterns of operators and other staff, or the introduction of stand-alone systems.

Enabling organizations to manage their energy dilemmas and make more accurate decisions about energy use, supplier allocation and load shedding, there is a growing trend towards the following five key approaches:

Energy Management process: an organization needs to follow a structured energy management process to increase the gains through energy efficiency. Using a tiered approach to energy efficiency helps align the savings goal of an organization to its investment capabilities.

Audit and measure energy flows: a comprehensive energy analysis of data from all major energy consumers in a facility, and includes examining energy usage patterns and demands; and evaluating their impact on total energy consumption. It is a key component in identifying efficiency improvement opportunities in a facility.

Fix the basics of energy use: Identify quick wins, process energy waste, leakages and take necessary actions to immediately incur benefits. Fixing the basics is comprised of implementing passive energy efficiency measures like high-efficiency lighting, HVAC systems, motors and capacitors.

Optimize through automation and regulation: Integrating active energy management measures in an automated manner promotes ongoing energy efficiency improvements and helps maintain and improve energy and cost savings over time.

Monitor, maintain and improve: Managing key energy demands and modifying employee behavior drives continuous improvement through information, training and management review, and helps ensure that initial energy and cost savings do not erode over time.

Successful organizations are deploying energy strategies, integrating tools that help operations measure, improve and analyse energy and process data in context and real-time; so that business and environmental goals are met without the need for significantly large capital expenditure. It is expected that the day may come when industrial facilities are designed and built based on energy flows (rather than material flows). However, in the current and medium turn, by automating energy management directly to the process, smart organizations can improve their bottom line and ensure efficiency.