Improving energy performance is a major challenge for industrials, making it possible to meet numerous objectives:
Reduction of operational costs: Better energy efficiency makes it possible to significantly reduce energy bills, thus improving the profitability of the company.
Reduction of environmental impact: Reducing energy consumption contributes directly to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and the company's carbon footprint.
Regulatory compliance: Faced with increasingly stringent regulations on energy efficiency (ISO 50001) and CO2 emissions (CSRD...), improving energy performance helps to remain in compliance over time.
Competitive advantage: Better energy management can lead to more competitive prices but also to differentiate itself on the market thanks to a better environmental impact of its products.
Innovation and modernization: The search for better energy performance stimulates technological innovation and the modernization of equipment, thus improving overall productivity.
In short, improving energy performance is a strategic lever for manufacturers, making it possible to combine economic, environmental and long-term competitive benefits.
An approach: the energy balance
The energy balance is an essential tool for improving the energy performance of an industrial company. Here's how to build and use it effectively:
Construction of the counting plan
An energy metering plan is an essential tool for measuring and monitoring energy consumption in an industrial installation. It makes it possible to identify the main consumption items and to set up precise monitoring of energy performance.
Here are the steps to build an effective energy metering plan:
Identify energy sources: Identify all the energy sources used in the installation (electricity, gas, steam, etc.).
Map energy flows: Create a diagram of energy flows in the factory, identifying the main consumers.
Measure: Determine strategic locations for measuring energy flows and retrieve data from sensors already in place and, if necessary, install new sensors to improve the comprehensiveness of the metering plan.
A well-designed metering plan makes it possible to precisely monitor energy consumption.
Construction of the energy balance
The energy balance is a quantitative analysis tool that makes it possible to monitor and account for all the energy flows entering and leaving a process. In particular, it makes it possible to calculate the energy performance indicators of the various unit steps and large assemblies of the process, but also to identify the losses. It can be carried out either with a temporal vision (by the day, week, month...) or with a product angle (production order, product, product family).
The construction of an energy balance on a process step or a production line requires a methodical approach, combining metering plan data and production traceability information. Here are the key steps to get there:
Retrieve production traceability data and quantify product volumes, operating times, and possible production stoppages or changes.
Combine them with the energy consumption data from the metering plan to aggregate them to the desired granularity: time period, production order, campaign...
Calculate the desired energy performance indicators, the specific energy consumption (energy consumed per unit produced), the overall energy efficiency indicators of the line or process step concerned.
Present a global vision of information with energy inputs and outputs for the whole studied, highlight energy losses (by flow measurement, calculation of differences from theory, etc.)
By following these steps, you will obtain a precise and usable energy balance, making it possible to identify the levers for improving the energy performance of your process or production line.
Use to improve energy performance
The energy balance is the starting point for improving energy performance, in particular:
Analyze losses: study in detail the differences identified in order to understand their origins (leaks, energy efficiency, maintaining the temperature of installations, malfunctioning of energy recovery installations, etc.).
Identify opportunities for improvement by prioritizing the losses that are the biggest or easiest to reduce.
Determine the modifications of the installations to switch to more efficient technologies.
Conduct Pinch type approaches to maximize energy recovery within processes.
Optimizing processes: optimizing unit steps, reducing process variabilities...
Monitor progress: monitor the energy balance and energy performance indicators over time to measure the impact of actions and adjust the improvement strategy.
By systematically using the energy balance, manufacturers can identify sources of waste, optimize their use of resources and thus significantly improve their energy performance, which translates into very significant economic and environmental gains.
Improve your energy performance with OIAnalytics
Automate the monitoring of your energy balance and your energy performance indicators
Our tools make it possible, based on sensor data (flow rates, counting, etc.) and traceability data, to carry out energy balances on continuous or batch processes, to calculate energy performance indicators, to calculate specific consumption, to calculate the losses and thus to have all the information necessary to work on energy performance. This is made possible thanks to our contextualization engine, which makes it possible to simplify and automate the aggregation of data to transform them into relevant information to have both a vision of changes over time, as well as a fine-knit vision (production order, batch, batch, campaign, product, line...).
So, you can build your tools for tracking and identifying losses. These tools allow you to prioritize areas of progress but also to monitor improvements following the actions implemented.
Tools to go beyond measurement
The OIAnalytics solution allows manufacturers who want to improve their energy performance to go further than simply monitoring KPI and losses. In particular, it allows:
Integrate external elements such as weather conditions, market data (electricity, gas prices, etc.) into monitoring and analysis.
Analyze past performances to understand the causes of variability in energy performance or losses in order to optimize and control key process parameters.
Solve energy performance problems and understand why, over certain periods, certain batch series, performances are lower than normal.
To set up tools to predict future consumption based on known production elements (planning, etc.) or to recommend the trade-offs to be made (choice of energy used on a flexible system, activation of demand response services, etc.).
Use your data to improve energy performance
As a result, you can better manage, monitor and understand your energy performance, understand the parameters that affect it, investigate the root causes of losses, and thus take the right corrective and improvement actions.
