Remote - October 2011 - (Page 12)

Applications - Feature Reducing Industrial Energy Consumption: Monitoring is the Key iour, and that means measurement; the 19th Century physicist Lord Kelvin Today, as never before, the subject of energy efficiency is on everyone’s agenda, at personal, corporate and national levels. We have all become famously said, “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” Perhaps acutely aware of issues such as climate change and pollution caused by the surprisingly, inputs to many energy-intensive processes are relatively poorly burning of fossil fuels, and the need to reduce our carbon footprint. Even if metered. New building regulations in many countries will enforce higher there were no other pressures, rising costs alone would demand attention; standards of energy monitoring, but existing facilities, many of which will in recent years electricity costs have risen, on average, between 5 and 10 be in use for many years, have no such infrastructure. percent per year. Many industrial processes, however, were designed in an Automotive Fuel-Tank era when the pressures to be as green Production Monitoring as possible, and to extract the maxiEnergy costs were high mum value from every unit of energy on the agenda for automotive consumed, had not yet materialized. component and system-maker It is no surprise, therefore, that INERGY automotive Systems there is scope in many processes to when the company launched a make significant reductions in energy program to optimize and reduce input, without impacting on productivits energy consumption as part ity or product quality. In some cases of the sustainable development savings can be achieved simply by policy within the group. INinspection. There may be, for example, ERGY is a developer and manumotors or heaters that run continuously facturer of fuel systems, and when they are only required for part in particular, advanced plastic of a production cycle. Other potential fuel tanks. Inergy Automotive economies will be less obvious, and Systems was founded in 2000 will only be apparent from a closer as a joint venture combining the study of the processes involved. Funplastic Fuel Systems operations Wireless monitoring allowed INERGY to manage its energy costs and reduce costs. damental to controlling any system is of Plastic Omnium and Solvay a detailed knowledge of its behavS.A. Today, the company is a Tier One supplier of plastic fuel systems to the major car manufacturers. In 2009, INERGY manufactured 9 million fuel systems to major car manufacturers’ world wide and achieved a turnover of 900 million Euro. The project, which became known as INeco: INERGY Energy Consumption Optimization, was created to improve energy efficiency in the context of the group’s total usage of around 228,000 Megawatt-hours of electricity, almost all of the company’s energy input is electricity, which is approximately the same amount of power that a European town of 60,000 people would use. This INeco project and full deployment are managed by Stéphane Duval and Joseph Brossard. An early step was to put in place a series of energy audits for the major manufacturing processes in use at INERGY’s plants, beginning with the facility at Pfastatt, France. The first audit, in 2009, had the objective of gathering detailed information of the energy consumption over a period of three weeks, analysing this data and using the results as the basis of action plans. Naturally, each plant had electricity metering at the level of input from the grid, for supplycompany billing purposes, but a much more electrical sub metering solution, to gather instantaneous current data, was required at the level of each individual machine and process. The project’s nature demanded a temporary set-up for an energy audit in an existing factory; therefore, it had to be easy and fast to install and uninstall. A traditional cabled solution was initially considered, but this proved too difficult and expensive to install for such a short period. There were very few plug and play measurement solutions available, and the only realistic candidate that emerged was LEM’s Wi-LEM, wireless local energy meter. Wi-LEM’ energy meter nodes are current transducers that employ split cores; they can be clamped around a conductor with no need to disconnect anything for the purposes of installing continuous-loop sensors, or in-line current sensors. They gave INERGY the freedom to install the measurement node at the most convenient access point in each power cabinet and, crucially, required no down-time. Despite being simple to install, the systems’ measurement nodes exceed the demands of the IEC 62053-21 standard for 12 www.RemoteMagazine.com Installing the Monitors http://www.infowebcom.com http://www.infowebcom.com http://www.RemoteMagazine.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Remote - October 2011

Remote - October/November 2011
KEMA Named a Seaport-Enhanced Prime Contractor for the US Navy
Opto 22 Releases iOS App for Automation and Control System
Powering Advanced AMR/AMI Networks
Smart, Connected Remote Sites
Minnesota D.O.T. Makes a Right Turn - To a Flexible Monitoring Solution
Reducing Industrial Energy Consumption: Monitoring is the Key
Shacking up in the Artic
AFCON Software and Electronics Released Pulse V1.50 with New Event Manager Add-On
Digi Launches New 3G iDigi Development Kit
Hikvision Launches 650 TVL CCD Day/Night Camera
VYCON Introduces Hybrid VDC XEB Energy Storage System
Crenlo Adds NEMA Wall-Mount Enclosures to Product Lineup
Industry News
Calendar of Events

Remote - October 2011