Plant managers need to take action to keep energy usage and costs under control
Although awareness for Energy Management has certainly risen in the last years due to ever rising energy prices, climate change and resulting public policy, the topic is not new and there are many solutions and vendors in the market. Electricity costs for industrial customers have increased significantly in many countries, e.g. in Germany they have doubled in the last 15 years, but companies that establish energy management can save costs and benefit from tax reliefs. Plant managers need to take action to keep energy usage and costs under control. Our solution can help to make energy flows transparent across the factory and identify savings potentials while being scalable for multiple (worldwide) production sites since it leverages state-of-the-art cloud technology. Read in this success story how to reduce your energy cost, discover energy saving potentials and meet national efficiency standards.
Sustainability and an environmental and resource-saving corporate philosophy are priorities for the Volkswagen Group. However, also the electricity costs for industrial customers have increased significantly in many countries in the last years. In Germany, for example, costs have even doubled during the last 15 years. Also tempting is the fact that German companies which establish a sustainable energy management can benefit from tax reliefs. The matter of energy costs has thus reached a level of urgency in car manufacturing that requires actions to be taken. The pressure on Volkswagens plant managers is enormous: they must optimize the use of energy and keep energy costs on an adequate level.
Solution – transparency on energy flows in the production line, in a plant, or even worldwide
The first step in achieving a sustainable and cost-saving energy management is to get a comprehensive overview of the current situation in a plant. Therefore, Siemens created a comprehensive data hosting solution, which combines device management, connectivity, and all necessary data storage plus the associated infrastructure, to provide a virtualized energy management that can be deployed and scaled quickly. The solution is based on the data model and connectivity of MindSphere, Siemens Industrial IoT as a service solution, allowing plant managers to use the same data and assets with all MindSphere apps. The application collects and visualizes where and when energy is consumed per production line, plant, or even enterprise wide. Thereby, the plant manager is able analyze the energy data over time, create statistics, and correlations to identify peaks, losses, and anomalies. The application thus not only allows the user to initiate steps for optimization, but also to track, adjust, and report the energy consumption to follow the energy efficiency laws based on ISO 50001. Therefore, dashboards and KPIs can be created and configurated.