Manufacturing

Commentary:

This decade’s new quality

7 July 2010

Invensys' Bill Schiel addresses the rise of corporate energy management

Bill Schiel at Invensys addresses the rise of corporate energy management.

Energy management has been promoted! Long the ward of engineering and maintenance, energy management is now a responsibility shared throughout industrial and commercial corporate functions. Check any major corporation’s Web site and you’ll find a statement on energy management, usually as a key component of corporate sustainability.

Energy management has rapidly become a strategic initiative of an organisation, garnering high visibility from shareholders, the community and major customers. Encouraging and supporting these key initiatives in the United States are government programmes such as Save Energy Now, Superior Energy Performance and EnergyStar. Commercial and industrial energy users are also keenly anticipating the new ISO 50001 Standard for Energy Management. ISO 50001 will promote a managed approach to energy efficiency programmes, including key performance indicators (KPIs) to track improvements from a baseline. I predict it will be the ‘new quality’ for this decade.

Corporate energy management is a phrase used by the United States Department of Energy to describe this new practice. It is also now evident in new titles within companies and organisations. In the past six months, I’ve met many people who are charged with looking after the energy management programmes for their organisation, often at the executive level. They come from various walks of life, but most have engineering or environmental health and safety backgrounds.

To be successful, corporate energy managers need to be aware of how a vast portfolio of energy-consuming assets and operations is performing, in real time. For example, a major food company has manufacturing plants, large refrigerated distribution centres, and office space for sales, marketing and operations. It often also operates fleets of delivery vehicles. Each has a unique energy profile reflected in its cost accounting.

To be successful, corporate energy managers need to be aware of how a vast portfolio of energy-consuming assets and operations is performing, in real time

Bill Schiel, Invensys The emerging KPI for energy management is energy intensity. This encourages companies to produce their goods and services with less energy content. A company can grow, increasing production or services to meet market demands, and still show improvements in energy intensity. The reward for the corporation or organisation is reduced cost of goods or services, as the energy content of the bill of material is reduced.

Driving the energy intensity KPI is data from operations. It requires a convergence of traditional silos of data. For monthly awareness, an organisation needs simply to use its monthly energy bills and production reports. If there was significant energy waste early in the billing period, seeing the results a month later isn’t very useful in improving energy intensity. What is needed are daily, if not hourly, indications of energy intensity. This awareness is provided by real-time measurement of energy usage from all forms of energy: power, gas, fuel, steam, air, chill and water. If this data is collected along with data that identifies what was happening when the energy was used, the corporate energy manager has extremely valuable information: real-time energy intensity.

This information can and should be available to those who can affect its outcome, from production workers to maintenance managers to team leaders. The entire organisation becomes aware of the significance of energy use and can modify behaviour to improve energy intensity. The new corporate energy manager has a big job, and needs the appropriate tools to do it.

Invensys Operations Management is discussing corporate energy management at a series of workshops at Microsoft Executive Briefing Centers in 17 North American cities.

Bill Schiel is the product manager for the Wonderware Corporate Energy Management Application by Invensys Operations Management. This application bridges the gap between energy data collection and operational performance, enables real-time energy costing, and prepares an organisation to take advantage of the global smart grid emergence. It was designed and built for a corporate energy manager.

This article first appeared in the Summer 2010 edition of Prime.

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