Designing, deploying and maintaining the optimal site-wide or enterprise-wide energy management and emission control strategy is a large engineering and operational challenge, one that requires a wide span of competencies, engineering tools, architecture approaches and service capabilities in order to identify the most performing and cost-effective solution for each process area and site. Typical steps and modular approach for deploying a digital solution such as energy management are:
- Monitor: Monitoring energy usage at plant and process level with real-time visual displays and data
- Identify: Identify best performance of process areas and opportunities for improvement
- Report: Report energy consumption patterns of process areas and production lines
- Analyze: Analyze inefficiencies in plant and process areas
- Alarm: Alarm capabilities – enable corrective measures to be taken immediately
- Forecast: Forecast energy consumption schedules for process areas based on production plans and measured consumption
- Optimize: Solve economic real-time optimization problems consisting of own generation, trading and using of energy in industrial plants and power plants
A multitude of research is ongoing in areas such as process-specific data models and simulations, carbon capture, utilization and storage, or making green hydrogen a financially feasible option. Encouragingly, this will help process industries shift towards completely new ways of improving energy efficiency, reducing energy cost and carbon footprint. Increased complexity calls for digital solution partners mastering very different technologies, industry-specific processes and cybersecurity.