Increasing your energy performance: what is the role for data analysis?

Energy performance, a real challenge for the process industry

Energy consumption in the process industry accounts for about 85% of the energy consumption of the entire industry. Energy performance is therefore a priority issue in these sectors, where energy consumption represents a relatively large part of the cost of production (of the order of 5 to 20% depending on the sector).
For more details, consult the site of theATEE

The measure

ISO 50001 provides for the establishment of a metering plan in order to be able to monitor consumption, detect and correct drifts and verify the impacts of improvement actions.
This approach, which is relevant for controlling consumption, is not sufficient to generate significant improvements.

Areas for improvement

Opportunities for improvement lie at the heart of your production processes and your utilities:

• Improvement of the energy performance of equipment.
• Optimal use of different heat flows in processes and utilities.
• Questioning your processes in terms of energy consumption.
• Matching utilities with uses to achieve an overall optimum.

To work on these deposits, it is essential for you to have a good understanding of how your processes and your uses work, but also to have the factual elements to make good decisions. This is where a well-conducted data analysis will allow you to feed your thoughts and build relevant actions.

Analyzing your data

To activate the levers for improvement on these fields, you need to integrate data relating to your processes into your analyses: energy consumption, quality of raw materials, recipes, control parameters, type of production...
You must make this data available to teams that have the required expertise (process, production, engineering, etc.) through efficient and easily usable tools. It is the encounter between relevant and reliable information from your processes and the expertise of your teams that will allow the emergence of actions that will produce significant gains.

Data analysis will allow them to:

• To control consumption and avoid excesses;
• To optimize the operating point of your processes and equipment;
• To optimize the adequacy between your uses and your utilities;
• ...