Emerson Process Management has unveiled Energy Advisor, a real-time energy management information system that automates the process of monitoring and managing energy consumption across mills, plants and refineries. With real-time, meaningful information about a site's energy performance, process manufacturers can identify inefficiencies and irregularities and take corrective action, saving on average 5 to 10 per cent in energy costs annually.
In energy-intensive process industries like chemical, metals and mining, oil and gas, pulp and paper, and refining, where energy is often 30 to 50 per cent of their operating expense, these savings can have a significant impact on the bottom line.
"Energy Advisor is a natural extension to Emerson's Smart Energy Management portfolio," said Peter Zornio, chief strategic officer, Emerson Process Management. "In 2011, we announced the company's commitment to improving our customers' industrial energy efficiency and we began focusing on how to help our customers best optimise combustion processes, steam systems, and on-site electrical generation. In 2013, Emerson unveiled its pervasive sensing strategy that extends wireless technologies beyond process controls to include the extensive use of wireless sensors to monitor energy consumption in our customers' operations.
Energy Advisor leverages this technology with analytics to provide visualisation of the full energy picture, helping companies make smarter decisions with real-time insight into site-wide energy performance." Energy Advisor pulls energy data from various sources, including (but not limited to) Emerson's DeltaV™ and Ovation™ distributed control systems, as well as its wireless infrastructure, to provide real-time analysis and historical context.
Using Emerson's unique process models, manufacturers are now able to analyse and compare three critical items: the amount of energy a system is designed to use, what it has used over time, and what it is consuming in the moment. "Many manufacturers are looking at their energy performance, but it is usually in hindsight and is often an incomplete picture, with data culled from disparate sources," said Barbara Hamilton, energy management programme manager at Emerson Process Management. "To increase energy productivity and eliminate waste, manufacturers need more than historical data. They need real-time insight into what is going on to drive continuous improvement behaviour. That is what Energy Advisor delivers."
Energy Advisor integrates seamlessly with current site control and information systems, allowing a straight-forward and cost-effective implementation. Key features of the technology include Consumption Monitoring which identifies and logs root causes for energy over-consumption events and a Data Integrity Checker that verifies integrity of energy data before it is used. There is also an Energy Target Calculator which creates models from past historical data to predict target energy consumption. Optional process models from Emerson provide theoretical targets as well as other energy-related performance indicators. Standard Reports include cost per unit of production, energy performance trends and electrical demand cost.
