Emerson Process Management introduces the Energy Advisor, a new energy
management information system designed to provide real-time insight into energy
performance at industrial facilities.
Energy Advisor automates the process of monitoring and managing energy
consumption across mills, plants and refineries, helping process
manufacturers reduce energy costs by up to 10% annually through improved energy
targeting and utilisation.
Emerson’s Energy Advisor system ensures process manufacturers have
access to real-time, meaningful information about a site’s energy performance, enabling
them to identify inefficiencies and irregularities and take corrective action.
The new energy management information system is especially relevant
within energy-intensive process industries such as chemical, metals and mining,
oil and gas, pulp and paper, and refining, where energy often accounts for 30-50
percent of their overall operating expense; any savings achieved on energy
consumption can therefore, have a significant impact on the bottom line. Energy
Advisor is a natural extension to Emerson’s Smart Energy Management portfolio.
Peter Zornio, chief strategic officer, Emerson Process Management
explains that the Energy Advisor is an outcome of the company’s commitment to
improving their customers’ industrial energy efficiency by helping them optimise
combustion processes, steam systems, and on-site electrical generation.
Emerson’s pervasive sensing strategy unveiled in 2013 was designed to extend
wireless technologies beyond process controls to include the extensive use of
wireless sensors to monitor energy consumption in their 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. Manufacturers use Emerson’s unique process models 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 at the moment.
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; Data Integrity Checker, which verifies integrity of energy data before
it is used; Energy Target Calculator, which creates models from past historical
data to predict target energy consumption; and Standard Reports comprising of
cost per unit of production, energy performance trends, and electrical demand
cost.