Emerson Process Management, a business of St. Louis-based Emerson (NYSE: EMR), today 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 percent 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 percent 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 optimize 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 visualization 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 analyze 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 program 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 behavior. 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: identifies and logs root causes for energy over-consumption events.
- Data Integrity Checker: verifies integrity of energy data before it is used.
- Energy Target Calculator: 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: including cost per unit of production, energy performance trends, and electrical demand cost.
Schneider Electric, a global specialist in energy management and automation, has acquired LimeWare, a provider of system analysis and auditing software for Schneider Electric‟s Foxboro Evo™ process automation and I/A Series® distributed control systems. The acquisition provides foxray software to help customers pinpoint and address critical industry challenges.
A key trend in the industrial automation industry, the Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming the way that many businesses operate. Kepware Technologies, a software development company focused on communications for automation, today announced that CEO Tony Paine will speak to this technology at the upcoming ENTELEC Conference & Expo. His presentation titled "Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Communications at the Edge" occurs on Wednesday, April 8 at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, Texas.
Schneider Electric, the global specialist in energy management, has released Wonderware® Alarm Adviser to work with industry-leading Wonderware InTouch®, Wonderware System Platform, Vijeo Citect® and ClearSCADA® software products. Based on industry recommended standard alarm management practices, Wonderware Alarm Adviser is an interactive, web-based application for visual analysis of historical alarm data. It provides an instant view of alarm activity for a specified time period, allowing engineers to quickly analyze alarm patterns and identify nuisance alarms that can lead to operator distractions.