Rockwell Automation reportedly announced that smart, safe and sustainable manufacturing solutions for the ongoing smart grid boom could help companies save up to $6 billion a year, or about 10 percent of the total U.S. industrial electrical energy costs, and claims that it has developed precisely such a portfolio.

 

Company officials claim the solutions include energy optimization applications that are integrated within an industrial energy management system based on Rockwell Automation industrial automation and information technology, and the systems help manufacturers to automatically balance energy load in real time by suitably including alternate energy solutions online. The end result is an efficient solution that is hybrid when required and is connected to the smart grid.

 

“The manufacturing sector is responsible for almost a third of U.S. energy consumption, primarily by driving loads with electric motors,” said Sujeet Chand, chief technology officer for Rockwell Automation. “While recent smart grid demonstrations have focused on benefits to homes and commercial buildings, we look forward to working with manufacturers and electric power companies to save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions as industrial processes consume less electricity.”

 

Rockwell said that there appears to be a convergence of all aspects of information technology and the manufacturing industry such as applications, people, physical assets, business processes, shop floor workflow, vendor management, the customer and the handling of terabytes of data. This extreme and detailed visibility of each and every aspect of manufacturing allows decision makers to suitably alter course according to a combination of trends, increases overall efficiency, provides the requisite competitive edge, lower costs and assists in profitable sustenance.

 

“Until now, manufacturers had to make decisions without knowing how energy directly affects their production costs and impacts the bottom line,” said Terry Gebert, vice president and general manager of Rockwell Automation Global Solutions. “By combining OEE, a key performance indicator used by many manufacturers, with an energy model to create an energy blueprint – or ‘greenprint’ – for any production process, we can develop a long-term strategy for smarter energy use.”

 

Company officials claim that entire manufacturing units can have their own smart grid with the nation’s smart grid and in that sense can be easily smart grid ready. With this portfolio of offerings from Rockwell, individual machines are in a position to self-manage energy consumption and send data to the central server, which in turn transmits the information with comparative metrics to authorized personnel and automated energy data management systems.

 

“Manufacturers can begin to capture actual energy use and add it to their bill of materials and other production records,” said Gebert.

 

Instead of bandying around the expression, ‘carbon foot print,’ Rockwell prefers the expression, ‘greenprint,’ and says its inside out approach gives comprehensive micro-level details of the energy ‘greenprint’ impact. The company’s solutions also help in minimizing raw material waste, monitor and report greenhouse gas emissions, and recover and recycle solvents, said officials.

 

A recent report claimed that ARRA has allotted $11 billion, of the total $63 billion towards energy, for Smart Grid initiatives till end 2010, and the public, private, and consumer factors are all driving this growth.

 

A “smart grid” has Internet connectivity so that signals can be sent and received for each and every connected and authorized device. For example, in this case, smart meters. In a broader sense, the Smart Grid concept creators envisaged that the entire grid would work more efficiently, accommodate wind and solar power, possibly lower electricity bills by optimizing electricity flow, and constantly reduce the carbon footprint.

 

The Department of Energy has decreed that smart grids must facilitate: Self-healing from power disturbance events; enabling active participation by consumers in demand response; operating resiliently against physical and cyber attack; providing power quality for 21st century needs; accommodating all generation and storage options; enabling new products, services, and markets; and optimizing assets and operating efficiently.

 

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