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You can tell energy efficiency is weighing on the minds of process manufacturers across many industries. How do I know? One way is to be part of the Automation & Control Engineering LinkedIn group. David Greenfield asked the simple question:

What tips, tricks and basic engineering processes have you used -- or recommend using -- to increase the energy efficiency of your facility?

As I write this post, the question was posed a month ago and there are now 66 public responses. No telling how many additional private responses he's received. These responses are coming from process manufacturers, automation suppliers, consultants, and others with something to offer.

Some responses include DC bus sharing, variable frequency drives, LED lighting, energy management planning, pressure drop utilization, power factor correction capacitors, boiler optimization, heat waste recovery, co-generation, control valve performance, HVAC optimization, etc. These ideas go on and on for four pages, and counting.

These ideas touch things that are process related, power related, facilities related--almost every organization in a manufacturing facility.

Given all the possible things you can do--what should you do? In addition to all the great ideas shared in this LinkedIn group, we have more than 25 posts in the energy management category of this blog. I'll cite one example from Emerson's Bob Sabin on the need to develop and energy management plan in the post, Moving to Leadership in Energy Reduction. I wrote:

Bob described the energy improvement process that begins with survey and measurement, followed by actions to fix field devices and loops, followed by equipment repair, followed by unit process optimization, followed by site coordination to drive the entire operation to the best cost point within constraints. Although the process is never ending, the savings are cumulative with each pass through the improvement cycle.

I anticipate the number of energy efficiency-related posts will continue at a steady pace. It's not only in process manufacturers' economic interests, it also helps them improve emissions, cut waste, and promote cleaner manufacturing.

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Boilers remain a large source of energy consumption in most plants. Emerson's Bob Sabin, whom you may recall from many earlier energy management-related posts, has some great thoughts on a recent Plant Services magazine article.

The article Boiler inspection and maintenance by Stephen Kleva provides an overview and reminder of aspects of safe and economical boiler operation, and makes a number of good points. Building on this, it occurs to me that instrumentation and control technology can be leveraged to help accomplish the goals of maintaining safety and achieving lowest possible costs.

Boiler owners sometimes overlook the value of a fully functional automated control system and a computerized asset monitoring system. Mr. Kleva notes several things regarding how problems with a boiler process can occur:

It's important to remember that most problems don't occur suddenly. Instead, they develop slowly over a long period of time.

Boiler logs provide a continuous record of the boiler's operation, maintenance and testing. Because operating conditions change slowly over time, a log is the best way to detect significant changes that might otherwise go unnoticed.

"The success of any boiler log is determined by how vigilant the operator is in regularly updating it.

Most operations personnel would agree with the statements above, yet many sites do not have or do not fully maintain the equipment needed for complete monitoring and/or comprehensive performance logging. For example, it is all too common for boilers to be operated for long periods with known instrumentation problems. For a variety of reasons, these are not promptly addressed, but they certainly contribute to less than most economical operation, and sometimes play a part in a breakdown.

Today's computer technology allows monitoring of boiler process measurements to be done consistently and automatically every minute of the year, and further, today's tools provide alerts when a parameter trends out of normal range, changes too quickly, or exceeds a constraint. The unfortunate situation is that most sites have not implemented these asset-monitoring tools even though they are relatively inexpensive and not very complicated to apply.

Extending this, many sites have not taken advantage of computerized data logging and historical data management. Even at their best, paper logbooks provide only a minimal view of process performance. They are only one-value snapshots of process parameters at a one- or two-hour interval and they are subject to gaps in data when operations personnel are tied up with other tasks. Computer control and data historian systems monitor the process in the range of every half second, do not get interrupted, and provide a multitude of data analysis tools to observe trends, identify abnormalities, and provide the basis to drive improvement.

The article also mentions, "Optimal air-to-fuel ratio is important because a boiler requires just the right amount of oxygen to ensure efficient combustion." Mr. Kleva goes on to relate that a control system is the tool to use to achieve optimized combustion consistently over time.

A good control system will manage efficiency over the load range of the boiler, and will be designed to work with any other boilers that are present on the site. Many (if not most) industrial sites run more than one boiler to produce required steam. A modern control implementation will calculate the cost per steam in real time per boiler, and will manage load across all available boilers in order to provide the lowest cost steam in total within applicable constraints.

While instrumentation and controls may sometimes seem to be only a necessary evil for a boiler process, they have been repeatedly proven to be a technology and tool that improves performance by supporting safe operation and optimizing the economic outcome.

Bob, thanks for adding your perspectives on the role process automation can play to this boiler maintenance article!

Last week I was on the phone with Emerson's Bob Sabin, a consulting engineer on the Industrial Energy Solutions team. You may recall Bob from some earlier energy efficiency-related posts. As I'm prone to do this time year after our annual Emerson Exchange meeting, I asked Bob if he did an Emerson Exchange presentation. He did in fact present, A Structured Optimization Plan for Leveraging Control Technology to Reduce Energy Costs and Improve Overall Plant/Mill Profitability.

Bob discussed the increasing focus on energy due to its cost and increasing emissions regulatory climate across the globe. It's a case where greater energy efficiency is both the "green" thing to do by reducing emissions and it lowers operational costs by reducing one of the largest controllable costs. Energy usage improvement is an aspect of overall production optimization and savings go directly to the bottom line.

Bob cited an ARC Advisory Group study, Best Practices in Energy Management, which categorizes leaders, competitors, and followers in the reduction of energy usage. Half of the leaders reduced energy consumption by 10-15% each year, while over half the followers made no progress or did not know if they had made any progress.

He outlined a typical site energy-flow perspective, beginning with the sources of energy: purchased steam, purchased fuel, raw materials consumed as fuel, and purchased power. The fuel and raw material fuel are converted to steam and electrical power and consumed by the process in steam and electric drives, process heating and cooling, fired equipment such as fired heaters and dehydration units, and direct-fueled equipment and processes. The site may also export steam, fuel and power. Bob and the consulting team work with process manufacturers to assess these areas for ways to minimize (energy inputs), improve efficiency, optimize, and maximize (energy outputs).

Bob described the energy improvement process that begins with survey and measurement, followed by actions to fix field devices and loops, followed by equipment repair, followed by unit process optimization, followed by site coordination to drive the entire operation to the best cost point within constraints. Although the process is never ending, the savings are cumulative with each pass through the improvement cycle.

In the survey and measurement phase where measurements don't currently exist, Bob recommends considering wireless devices to monitor steam flows, condensate returns, water and warm water usage, air flows, and air pressures. Wireless measurements can be implemented at a fraction of the cost of traditional wired devices. The survey and measurement phase is where benchmarks are established to monitor performance over time and compare current operations with known industry standards to establish the economic case to justify investment.

Many plants have opportunities to fix leaks, maintain steam traps and improve insulation on their steam, air, and water systems. Other areas to fix the basics include measurement device calibration and final control element inspection for linearity and repeatability. These loops are often in manual when the devices are not performing correctly. Variable frequency drives for fans, pumps, and other cyclical load devices can be more efficient than processes with recirculation loops and throttled flow.

Once these basics are addressed in a bottom up approach and the process is returned to automatic control, units can be optimized. The highest benefit is typically only sustainable if a holistic approach is taken starting with the basics. Bob recommends a "single knob" strategy where a single operator input establishes the process rate. It incorporates equipment and process constraints, coordinated rate/load changes, and bumpless, balanceless manual/auto transfer. The regulatory control can then be enhanced with advanced process control that incorporates process specific techniques and expertise. To gain the desired improvements in energy efficiency, the design targets the process controls to be in automatic mode more than 95% of the time.

Bob gives examples of simple utility operations with and without multiple fuel sources to more complex operations. No matter the complexity, the road to lower emissions and lower energy usage begins by measuring it, fixing it from the bottom up, getting on automatic control, incorporating process expertise into the control strategies, and layering models for area/site optimization. It's also the way to move profitably from follower to leader.

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For many industrial plants and mills, energy costs can be 10 to 20% of their overall business costs. Given these significant costs, leaders in the industrial process industries establish and maintain continuous energy optimization programs to minimize energy cost impact. According to an ARC Report, Best Practices for Energy Management:

Energy can be the largest component of a manufacturer's cost structure. Despite a recent drop in energy prices, costs are still trending upward over the long term...

I caught up with Emerson's Bob Sabin, whom you may recall from earlier posts. Bob is an industrial energy consulting engineer who helps process manufacturers establish this continuous improvement process. It starts and carries on with measuring how much energy is being purchased, produced, and used throughout the plant/mill site. It's important to establish a baseline for steam, electricity, fresh water, air, and process water usage. The perspective should be how much is being consumed by each site area/process. As time goes on, the baseline can be monitored for changes due to equipment issues, energy use can be compared to known industry benchmarks, and projects to improve energy performance can be justified with hard data.

After the survey and measurement phase, it's important to complete basic tasks such as fixing steam devices, maintaining measurement and final control devices, and addressing control loops that contribute to process variability. This variability directly correlates with higher energy consumption. From there, owners are in position to move on to unit process energy optimization and unit coordination for energy savings.

Often key measurements required to monitor energy consumption are not in place because of capital cost barriers. These barriers have been made higher in the past due to the difficulties in running cable infrastructure to the wired instruments. Bob shared how some industrial manufacturers are using WirelessHART measurement devices to significantly reduce the capital cost barriers associated with installation. Bob noted that energy measurement projects today could be completed at one-third the cost as compared to traditional implementations.

He shared an example where one mill added about 70 wireless transmitters measuring steam flows, condensate returns, water and warm water flows, airflows, and air pressures. Given the old adage, "You can't control what you can't measure", these measurements helped identify inefficiencies in the process and give a true energy usage picture to properly assign the costs. Having this energy monitoring information can also help make better profitability decisions by helping to determine product or grade costs during peak and off-peak hours.

Bob described a case where the site's steam use had spiked at a heat exchanger during a condensate flood. This helped the operations team more quickly resolve the situation and save considerable energy waste. Another example is how these wireless measuring devices helped spot air, steam, and water leaks that were not being quickly noticed during maintenance rounds.

I got fired up when Bob closed his thoughts to me with a Vince Lombardi quote, "If you don't keep score [measure], you're only practicing." Game, on!

Update: Podcast added.

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I've been catching up on some of my automation and industry RSS feeds, and saw an interesting post, Energy Costs: Why is Industry So Slooooooow to React?, from the Energy Pathfinder blog.

The post describes process manufacturers struggling with high energy costs. They tend to pursue lower energy prices first, but cutting waste is a much slower process. The fourth bullet point caught my attention:

To make energy improvements, a facility must accommodate change. Meaningful energy solutions require some combination of changes to technology, procedures, and practices. Change poses challenges--even threats--to people whose livelihood is connected to long-standing procedures and priorities. Change requires front line energy managers to practice a certain amount of salesmanship. Sadly, this kind of communication is often not the strength of most powerhouse superintendents or maintenance directors. Many good energy-saving proposals never get off the ground for this reason.

I sent a link to the article to Emerson's Bob Sabin, whom you may recall from earlier posts. Bob is an energy-management consulting engineer and I wanted to see if his experiences were similar or different.

Bob wrote back:

It is curious why North American industry has been slow to react to energy costs, but then we have seen the same deliberate, measured response to other competitive pressures. Energy improvement projects compete with all other potential maintenance or improvement projects for the scarce capital dollar.

The way many organizations are structured, it does typically take a person acting as a project champion to raise an energy improvement idea for consideration. It takes a lot of effort to deliver the documentation regarding payback, to convince business management that there is low risk, and then to work with line operations to convince them that the project is in their interest, also. These champions most often emerge from operations or engineering middle management.

Unfortunately, middle management in many plants/mills suffers from existing day-to-day challenges and the lack of resources and training. They are often not in a position to make necessary changes to entrenched work processes. We see this every day in the instrumentation and control business.

With PCs on every desk, handhelds by the dozens, the Internet, wireless, and other technologies, a large percentage of plants/mills still struggle with basic process measurement and automatic control. There is still quite a bit of opportunity to apply basic process control technology to reduce energy consumption and improve other production performance measures.

The potential savings from lower energy costs can help place focus on education, leadership, and training which in turn will improve energy performance and other business metrics.

I agree with Bob's assessment that progress begins with economic justification and the focus of an organizational champion to drive the process forward. With many North American facilities designed in an era of inexpensive energy, folks like Bob can work with plants and mills to develop the justification to make their production process more energy efficient.

I was catching up on some of my industry-based RSS feeds and came upon an Energy Pathfinder blog post, Taming Energy Costs While Going Green: An Open Letter to Corporate America. The blog's author, Christopher Russell, asks and answers:

Energy cost control... Green marketing... Can you be successful at both? The answer is "yes," but you should be prepared to manage both in a combined effort.

What caught my eye was his fourth point:

Harvest more value from your existing process control systems. Companies everywhere are relying on information systems to manage their core production processes. It's a small effort to amend those same systems to accommodate energy performance monitoring. Energy savings can increase the returns on existing control systems.

I ran this post by Emerson's Bob Sabin, an energy management specialist. You may recall Bob from earlier posts on boilers and energy management. With the rapid escalation in energy prices, you might imagine that the energy management team is pretty busy--and you'd be right.

I asked Bob for his thoughts on this fourth point, and he had a great response:

I believe it is true that many existing process control systems can be amended or enhanced to provide additional value in energy performance improvement. In the simplest case, the energy performance of most any process equipment can be closely monitored for efficiency of energy use. Trends of energy efficiency can be examined over time, and when degradation is seen, the root cause can be quickly identified and remedied. Monitoring of efficiency can be done locally at the plant/mill site, or it can be handled remotely by a central team or service provider.

In addition, processes can often be run with less variability such that they can be pushed nearer to their constraints. Being nearer to process constraints frequently brings the benefit of improved energy efficiency. Enhancing controls will drive reduced variability by allowing full automatic operation for a higher percentage of time and/or providing calculations that compensate for incoming variability.

Further, for sites that have complexity in operation that affects energy use, it can be beneficial to provide enhanced information systems capability that will support profitable operations decision making.

Often, energy needs, energy prices, and operating scenarios change so quickly and with so many permutations that it is virtually impossible for operations personnel to determine the single most profitable operating scenario at any given time. An Energy Management Information System (EMIS) can deliver this information in real time every day, all day.

An EMIS consists of a model of the processes involved that is automatically fed process data and gathers or takes user entered cost data. The EMIS model arrives at the most profitable operating scenario based on current production needs, actual costs in play, and the constraints that are in place for process operation. Emerson supports process manufacturers with various types of performance monitoring, variability reduction, and EMIS implementations.

As with most things we do, focus can produce results. In this case, energy savings can be achieved by leveraging and amending the existing process control and information systems. Depending on your plant or mill's energy consumption, it may be worth the development of models to compare actual operating conditions against the ideal case for optimum profitability.

High energy costs continue to prompt process manufacturers to seek ways to increase their energy efficiency. A colleague pointed a great post to me, The Seven Steps to Successful Industrial Energy Management, on the Energy Pathfinder blog.

My take away was that the culture for becoming more energy efficient starts at the top and developing metrics, incentives, and disincentives to change organizational behavior are keys to success.

I thought I'd share this post with Bob Sabin, a consultant in Emerson's Industrial Energy Solutions organization. You may recall Bob from earlier posts.

Bob believes improving the operation of the Industrial Powerhouse can be a large factor in improving overall energy management at process manufacturing sites. The carbon footprint of the powerhouse can be reduced, the reliability and responsiveness of the operation can be increased, and the cost of energy can be reduced--all at the same time.

With this focus (and not to be out done by the seven steps), Bob offers his ten steps to successful Industrial Powerhouse improvement:

1. Obtain top management commitment to improving the carbon footprint, reliability, and cost of operation of the Powerhouse.
2. Benchmark current operations in terms of efficiency, reliability, cost, and emissions.
3. Survey current process equipment, control technology, and operating methods. Create a matrix of factors that are impacting or limiting operating performance.
4. Examine potential process equipment repairs and upgrades that could deliver benefit, rank these in terms of return for investment, and complete repairs and upgrades that will deliver good immediate benefit.
5. Focus on process parameter measurement devices and actuators. Especially for combustion air and fuel flows, ensure that repeatable measurement and control capability exists.
6. Implement full automatic control that is robust and reliable. Even the best operating crews cannot optimize Powerhouse performance every minute of the day for every day of the year.
7. Install optimized control functionality as appropriate to optimize efficiency, prioritize lowest cost fuels, load equipment based on cost, and make economic operating decisions automatically.
8. Change Standard Operating Procedures for the Powerhouse to ensure that process units are run in automatic using the optimized control functions. Make focus of operations identifying and troubleshooting process issues rather than manual process operating adjustments.
9. Regularly benchmark operation in terms of efficiency, reliability, cost, and emissions, repeat steps above when results are not satisfactory.
10. Investigate and consider re-powering the industrial site with lower cost fuels and/or technologies.

Bob and the Industrial Energy Solutions consultants have helped process manufacturers achieve ongoing savings from improved energy efficiency by putting these steps into practice. If your energy costs are higher than they could be, give these ten steps a try or contact the industrial energy team for help.

Trying to manage energy consumption and steam usage in a manufacturing process can be a tricky undertaking. The need to do it is ever increasing with higher fuel costs. A recent AEI Environment Policy Outlook study shows the gas and oil price trends over the past 25 years.

The variables operations staff typically must juggle include process load requirements, multiple fuel types, boiler/turbine availability and efficiency levels, and electric buy/sell prices to name a few. Of course, steady state operations are rarely possible because product mix and volumes being produced are normally in flux.

You may recall Bob Sabin, a consultant in Emerson's Industrial Energy Solutions organization, from an earlier post on Chemical Recovery Boilers. Bob discussed how the team of energy consultants works with process manufacturers to develop facility specific models and rule sets to continually determine the optimum operating setpoints for all the process units.

They have packaged their approach into a SmartProcess Energy application that is used to reduce the total cost of energy in a mill/plant by automating critical decision-making. The energy optimization process begins with a review of existing Powerhouse operations and recent operating data. The consultants use off-line modeling tools to evaluate improved operating methods and estimate the level of savings that can be achieved. The effort reviews the fuel alternatives, purchased versus produced power options and constraints, and the current decision making process for optimizing energy and steam production and usage.

Bob said that a key to Emerson's energy optimization approach is extensive data validation to help the application tolerate measurement errors and device failures. The decision making rules for optimum operation are implemented using mathematical models running within the automation system controller.

He pointed to two areas of savings. The first is identifying large opportunities for cost improvement such as changes in fuel type usage. Perhaps more important is the second area, which is the constant small adjustments being made to process setpoints in real-time. This helps move the total operation to its absolute best cost point based on current constraints. These are adjustments that could not easily be recognized by the operators.

The Industrial Energy Solutions team has documented typical annual savings of $500K to $2MM USD where the SmartProcess Energy application has been applied.

We discussed improvement of multi-fuel boilers in an earlier post. Similarly, pulp and paper manufacturers often wrestle with chemical recovery boilers because of the complexity of the combustion process. This complexity is largely driven by the variability in the "fuel" (black liquor) and often by swings in production rate.

The variation in the BTU content of the incoming black liquor can cause difficulty in meeting the emissions restrictions, can lead to fouling of the boiler, may impact boiler efficiency, and can limit liquor throughput. Safety is also a major concern around a recovery boiler process.

Bob Sabin, a consultant in Emerson's Industrial Energy Solutions organization described the challenge as maximizing liquor throughput while minimizing the fouling of the upper boiler and maintaining optimal unit thermal efficiency. This can be done if the boiler combustion controls are configured to compensate for liquor BTU changes.

The process Bob and the team follow with pulp and paper manufacturers typically begins with an analysis where they measure the mills operating performance and compare it with world class performance. Some benchmarks include: maintaining excess oxygen at 1.5% to maximize unit efficiency, maximizing liquor throughput to either permit or steaming limits, minimize fouling to require one water wash per year, and running the recovery boiler in fully automatic mode more than 95% of the time.

Through this benchmarking process deficiencies and mechanical design limits can be identified and corrected. The economic benefits of process improvements can also be calculated.

Next a detailed field audit of valves, instrumentation, wiring, and control system performance is performed to find areas requiring attention.

With this assessment completed a complete cost estimate and return on investment calculation and justification can be developed to improve the performance of the recovery boiler. The expertise of the team has been packaged into a SmartProcess Recovery boiler solution which encompasses design, installation, commissioning, start-up, and operations personnel training.

Pulp and paper manufacturers typically experience project payback in three to six months through increased liquor throughput, better thermal efficiency, water wash reductions, and reduced variability in green liquor reduction.