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Energy Efficiency

REDUCE THE ENERGY CONSUMPTION OF A PRODUCTION LINE

31 March 2020 by

The following case study reports a project of Energy Efficiency in production plants, implemented in the manufacturing sector. In just one year, MIPU has managed to reduce the energy consumption of a customer’s production line by 11%.

“We didn’t expect there was so much energy waste in our process. This project has given us a great competitive advantage” – Technical Director.

“With better performance reports it is easier to inform the Board and get the approval for efficiency activities” – Chief Production Manager.

Energy efficiency is a key element in the journey towards a sustainable energy future. As the global energy demand continues to grow, actions aimed at increasing the energy efficiency are essential.

It is fundamental to improve the energy efficiency of plants in the industrial sector. This is because “energy efficiency” does not imply producing less to reduce energy consumption. Rather, it allows to enhance the plant productivity and efficiency, permitting the plant to produce the same with less resources.

Therefore, in industry more than elsewhere, energy efficiency has heavy implications both on the profitability and on the sustainability of production.

Process automation can help to improve the energy efficiency of industrial production plants in many ways. Implementing monitoring, control and optimization strategies positively affects energy performance. Directly, reducing waste, and indirectly, through maintenance practices that help to prevent an increase in energy consumption due to downtime, stop and start processes as well as defective products.

 

CUSTOMER PROFILE

In this case study, our client is a large company specialized in the production of metal components. It is also a world leader in the production of wagon parts, offering the widest choice of components and track-laying systems for tracked machines. Its production centers provide components and tracks for the main OEMs earthmoving machines, including Caterpillar, Komatsu, Hitachi, John Deere, Liebherr, Case CE and Dresserr.

 

CUSTOMER’S NEEDS: REDUCE ENRGY CONSUMPTION

The Ferrara plant covers almost 600.000 sm. and hosts 2.300 employees working with a three-shifts system. Every year the company spends about EUR 30 million on electricity and gas. Over the last 10 years, the Board has invested more than EUR 400 million in Innovation. Ferrara has used part of these investments to optimize energy use and become more efficient. The client contacted MIPU with the intention of starting a pilot project in order to assess the potential savings on the Ferrara site. The challenge was to reduce energy consumption of a production line by 5% with only 4 measuring devices and one-year ROI limit.

 

OUR SOLUTION FOR THE ENERGY CONTROL OF A PRODUCTION LINE

As first step, MIPU analyzed the whole production line and defined the most critical area, with the purpose of reducing initial investments and obtaining rapid and measurable results. This has become the goal of the pilot project. The critical production area identified was a molding line, composed of cutting bars plus load bars, oven, press and deburring machine. The annual expenditure on electricity was €400.000, which represented approximately 5% of the total expenditure on electricity of the plant.

RIDURRE IL CONSUMO ENERGETICO DI UNA LINEA DI PRODUZIONE

Consumption exceeds normal values due to a mechanical failure

Having 13 months of data collection, thanks to the 4 existing measuring devices, MIPU collected additional production data and started modeling the energy consumption of the line. This approach has made it possible to understand and predict the consumption of each component. Through historical data, it was therefore possible to identify causes of energy waste and inefficiency and thus set up an automated control of energy consumption.

 

THE RESULTS ACHIEVED: REDUCED BY 11% THE ENERGY CONSUMPTION OF A PRODUCTION LINE

Once consumption and costs were predicted, our costumer used CUSUM control charts to control consumption on an ongoing basis. As a result it was possible to:

  • – Understand the effects of interventions from an energy point of view;
  • – Find previous defects and define procedures to avoid them for an estimate return of €20.000/year;
  • – Use our software platform to automatically monitor the consumption of the production line avoiding additional waste with the value of €10.000/ year. An example of waste avoided is the detection of line malfunctioning;
  • – Improve maintenance by simply monitoring energy consumption. This resulted in additional direct cost savings of €5.000/year;
  • – Optimize the set-up parameters of the equipment, such as the oven temperature, the production cycle, guaranteeing an additional saving of 10,000 € / year;
  • – Know, verify and monitor the return on each action of energy efficiency;
  • – Plan a consumption budget for the line equipment;

Now the company is working on the third and fourth phase of the project: load management and continuous improvement.
In the load management phase, the Energy Manager is considering the possibility of reducing or dividing the use of the equipment into different tariff periods. Furthermore, The Energy Manager is setting up an automatic system to adjust HVAC operating parameters and illumination for different seasons.

The final energy saving was €45.000 for one year, meaning that thanks to this project the customer reduced by 11% the energetic consumption of the production line. This convinced the producer to install other 16 measuring devices in order to cover 80% of the total consumption. In this way, they were able to distribute the results obtained so far to the rest of their plant.

If you want to discuss a possible pilot project for your production site, just contact us.

SUCCESSFUL BENCHMARKING OF ENERGY CONSUMPTION

1 October 2019 by

An important telecommunication operator successfully bets on critical assets thanks to  the benchmarking of energy consumption.

““Now, it is clear which are the correct actions I have to pursue in order to fulfill my plan. It is very useful to find out how to obtain the maximum benefit from my assets in the shortest possible time ” – Financial Planner and Investment Officer

When you are trying to make improvements, the first question you or your management might ask is “How are we doing?” and the next is “how do we know?”

Benchmarking helps to answer these important questions. In other words, benchmarking is the process of comparison of your energy performance with something similar. “Something similar” means either the same asset, comparing its current performances with those of the same period of last year, or another similar asset.

Why benchmark energy consumption?

Understanding your organization energy consumption is the first starting point when considering any energy efficiency plan. By implementing a proven energy management strategy, such as energy benchmarking, you can achieve positive results on profits fairly quickly. This applies in particular to the energy monitoring in the telecommunication filed, because they dispose of a large number of distributed assets.

CUSTOMER PROFILE

In this case study, the customer is an Italian subsidiary of a multinational company of telecommunication services. The firm provides UMTS-based mobile phone services, Broadband Internet and Digital Mobile TV services. As phone network the company provides 3G and 4G services (also 2G through partnership with other network operators).

CUSTOMER’S NEEDS

The described Telecom owns 13000 Radio-Base Stations (RBS) and it monitors only 300 of them. The monitored data involve consumption and temperature data. This information was enough for us, since the main energy users in Radio Base Stations are conditioning systems. Annually the company spends around € 36. 000.000 on energy.

For a very long time the Telecom wanted to perform efficiency actions on their assets. However, due to the large number of sites to operate on, it was impossible to implement a joint action plan for all sites.

For this reason, the Telecom realized that they needed to know their most critical assets first and only then decide which actions to take, where and at what cost.

According to this, we understood that a good starting point for system improvement was to obtain a clear picture of equipment energy usage and highlight the most critical RBS

ENERGY BENCHMARKING: OUR SOLUTION

Through our software tool we have designed a solution that allowed the Telecom to identify low energy performance sites, to invest strategically in energy efficiency operations and monitor their effectiveness. This software identifies several possibilities for an asset energy performance improvement. By comparing the energy efficiency of Telecom’s assets, our tool has enabled to set the operations priorities and discover different ways to achieve savings.

The described solution is a complex analysis where, at the beginning, all energy users have been divided in energy consumption clusters. For each cluster a consumption model is identified, which allows to define the theoretical consumption (baseline) of each users. This model is based on the site characteristics and operational conditions (i.e. Degree Days in a year). Finally, an energy efficiency indicator is defined by comparing the actual and theoretical consumption for each site.

The comparison among the relative efficiencies of the different energy users allows to:

  • – check a critical number of users through a Distribution Matrix;
  • – verify the most critical energy assets through an Assessment Matrix.

For the abovementioned process execution, we needed some historical data. The customer disposed of billing information, environmental and geographical data of each RBS and meter data coming from all 300 monitored sites.

ENERGY BENCHMARKING: RESULTS

Through benchmarking analysis for energy efficiency it was possible to:

  • • Identify 40 inefficient assets from an energy point of view. The customer confirmed that some of those had already been selected for a deeper control in response to malfunctioning identification;
  • • Discover the most efficient assets within the clusters. Thanks to this evaluation we were able to define the best practices to follow through the direct comparison between efficient and inefficient assets;
  • • Estimate that with a restorative action on the 40 worst sites to bring their efficiency levels to the average of their respective cluster, it would have led to a 7% reduction of the total energy consumption.

Now the customer is working in order to verify the efficiency of its data acquisition system. Furthermore, it has also started to analyze the identified critical assets.

To know more about this case-study or about other energy efficiency improvement projects, contact us!

 

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