ABB is kicking off the new year with an update to the ABB Ability™ Energy Management System (EMS) user experience and user interface.
The ABB Ability™ Energy Management System has been a staple of the industrial automation world with origins going back more than 15 years, but in case we haven’t met before, let us introduce ourselves!
What is the ABB Ability™ EMS, and what does it do?
The ABB Ability™ Energy Management System maximizes sustainability performance and energy cost savings through a cycle of monitoring, forecasting, and optimizing production schedules and energy supply for an entire facility or enterprise. ABB Ability™ EMS helps process industries and manufacturing organizations make data-driven decisions about environmental, financial, and operational cost/benefit trade-offs while working toward carbon neutrality. Our energy monitoring capabilities help our customers gain or maintain ISO 50’001 certifications, and we enable better operations planning and energy procurement with real-time forecasting. Leveraging ABB’s decades of deep process industries and manufacturing expertise, our EMS can also reduce energy spend by up to 15% by optimizing production schedules to avoid energy demand and supply risks, price peaks, and penalties.
ABB Ability™ Energy Management System main dashboard 
ABB Ability™ Energy Management System energy flow diagram 
ABB Ability™ Energy Management System energy timeline 
ABB Ability™ Energy Management System contracted consumption chart
What’s new?
With this update, ABB is continually improving our EMS with a modern, web-based UI that retains our strong back-end foundation. To develop this new interface, we conducted interviews with customers spanning roughly 10 different user roles from Energy Managers to Environmental Specialists to Electricity Traders so that we could design the platform to be functional for everyone and their unique needs. Our designer has enhanced the existing role-based views and workflows in this latest release to make sure the right user gets the relevant information.
More detailed information about our monitoring and reporting dashboards can be found in the ABB Ability™ Energy Management System datasheet.
So what?
Every year, it is becoming more and more critical that we dramatically slash carbon emissions. The United Nations have stated that limiting global warming to 1.5⁰C will be an impossibility unless we “relentlessly [strengthen] ambition and implementation this decade”1, and according to the International Energy Agency, process industries like steel, aluminum, pulp & paper, and cement are not on track with the Net Zero Emissions by 2050 scenario2.
This year, join ABB in our commitment to sustainability. Reducing the environmental impact of your operations begins with understanding your baseline energy and emissions performance, so take your first steps with the ABB Ability™ Energy Management System.
Our sustainable future is digital. Let’s write the future, together.
References
1 United Nations, "Emissions Gap Report 2023: Broken Record - Temperatures hit new highs, yet world fails to cut emissions (again)," United Nations Environment Programme, Nairobi, 2023.
2 International Energy Agency, "Industry," IEA, 11 July 2023. [Online]. Available: https://www.iea.org/energy-system/industry. [Accessed 2 November 2023].
