An Energy Management System (EMS) provides relevant information on energy consumption and performance visible to various levels of an industry or a commercial organization, enabling them to plan, control and optimize energy consumption. It can lead to increased productivity through continuous monitoring of energy performance and implementing savings opportunities that, once implemented, are sustained over the long term.

Energy management is a continuous process and can be divided into three categories

• Measurement& data logging
• Analysis
• Targeting and Control

CSIR CSIO for BHEL, Ranipet has developed an “On-Line Energy Monitoring & Control System” with the support of Department of Science and Technology, India. The activity was carried out in two phases.

The developed system incorporates monitoring and control using flat distributed control system architecture and standard networking protocol which supports unlimited number of nodes and various channels like twisted pair, free topology, power line and RF for communication.

The system can handle measurements from

• electrical energy transmitters (as energy monitoring nodes)
• oil flow meters, gas flow meters, steam flow meters, temperature transmitters and compressed air flow transmitters (as analog I/O nodes or physical nodes)
• product output transmitters (as digital I/O nodes)

EMS software has been developed specifically for Energy Management System with Visual Studio as Front end and MS-SQL, server as back end on Windows XP. The software has the following features:

• Configuration of Devices, testing of nodes,
• Access levels and security features
• Data logging with time stamp,
• Alarms & Events and Control signals for fans
• Display screens, Real time and Historic Graphs for parameter display
• Reports

Utility of the system

The consolidated energy Information enables the management to have the status of the plant at their desktop. The information enabled the management to take corrective actions to prevent ideal running of machines, effective reactive power management and correlate with manpower and production with actual running hours of machines.

• The EMS gives comprehensive energy information consisting of:
• Energy consumption, Running hours, Starting and stopping time of equipment
• Substation level reports, Shift report, Comprehensive daily report etc.
• Over loaded / under loaded motors & faulty equipment

Post Installation Advantages

• The specific energy consumption of the plant per ton of production is brought down to 50% of the original consumption.
• Reduction of payment of penalties
• ROI with in 10 months through energy savings
• Empowered the MANAGEMENT with Information on Power Consumption of Utility Systems of Various Process Units, which was not available earlier in consolidated form.