Last year's blackouts in North America and Europe point to the vulnerability of industrial plants and their sophisticated production systems. U.S. manufacturers spend more than $33 billion annually on electricity, with electric motors absorbing "63% of all electricity in the U.S. industrial sector," notes Rick Schiltz, vp/capabilities & engineering at Rockwell Automation's integrated condition monitoring business. "With the use of predictive maintenance practices, such as condition-based monitoring and oil analysis, corrective actions can be taken to improve motor efficiency and energy consumption," he says. "By regularly tracking the condition of a motor or rotating equipment, problems can be detected and corrected before the equipment begins to consume higher levels of power to operate." (For more, click here.)

The complexities inherent in the power generation / distribution / end-use web make clearcut solutions impossible. "Electrical systems are inherently reliable," contends Dave Loucks, solution manager at Eaton Electrical. "They have few moving parts. They withstand momentary overloads. Infrequent failures invite complacency. Much of an organization's infrastructure operates on electricity. This makes electrical infrastructure a critical component. Inherent energy within electrical infrastructure invites catastrophic failures with large outlay of flash energy. Therefore, latent, unattended problems tend to remain benign until a final failure, which usually results in equipment damage and extended downtime." (For more, click here.)

Price vs Reliability

Despite the importance of reliability, industrial concerns continue to buy power on the basis of price, Loucks continues. "I don't see any market forces to change this in the near term so my prediction is that utility reliability will not improve substantially in the near term."

ICONICS' Tim Donaldson believes that "knowing who made changes in the system, what was changed, and when" is a major challenge. "Real-time reporting and traceability" will help improve plant operations. (For more, click here.)

Carlo Gavazzi product manager Dan Dudici lists "capacity overloading and simultaneous terrorist acts against remote HV distribution lines" as key threats. "Both can be addressed by building redundant distribution systems and on-site power generation." (For more, click here.)

Possible disruption from lightning strikes and other electrical surges often is overlooked, according to Mike Nager, industry marketing manager at Phoenix Contact Inc. "This can be especially true in older buildings that have either undersized electrical infrastructure or out-of-date grounding systems," he continues. "If a building isn't specifically protected against over-voltage spikes, then only luck can prevent damage from occurring." Available technology can "divert the full energy of a lightning strike away from a facility," without damaging equipment. "Some of this technology has been developed over the last decade in Europe and has perfected the arc-gap for use in low voltage (600 V and under) systems," explains Nager. (For more, click here.)

"Clearly conservation must be an integral part of the solution," notes Turbocor's Gene Smithart. "It is frequently the fastest way to take load off the power grid and to do it in a cost-effective manner." (For more, click here.)

Many aspects "crucial to the manufacturing process" can be improved at the plant site, reducing the "presence of outside suppliers who could potentially breach an operation's security measures," suggests Phil Tombaugh, director/new business development at Proton Energy Systems. (For more, click here.) (Pictured, Proton's HOGEN 20/40 hydrogen generator, designed to help a variety of industries reduce costs and save energy.)

Product Innovations

Innovations in "variable speed drives, high-efficiency lighting, [and] low-loss motors" also can help reduce energy consumption and increase efficiency in plant operations," adds David Pereles, marketing manager/electrical products at Fluke Corp. "Advances in environmental control systems -- [such as] replacing dampers with local fan controls -- have reduced consumption. LED lighting offers promise in this area, but the technology is still young. A good monitoring system can help the plant manager track demand and power factor. Active management of these parameters can reduce or eliminate utility surcharges." (For more, click here.)

SOR Inc product manager Ravi Jethra believes that "multifunction instruments/systems will not only help in savings on hardware costs, but also installation costs and related maintenance costs," while asset management software can help manage "already tight plant resources in scheduling effective maintenance operations." (For more, click here.)

Companies can track power use, cost, and quality with web-based software, comments Al Hamdan, senior marketing manager/Power & Energy Management Solutions at Rockwell Automation. "Load profiling, cost-allocation and billing capabilities allow users to correlate energy costs to production costs, and provide accurate cost accounting based on energy consumption," he explains. Users can view real-time data, and create historical trend reports and charts to create energy budgets and forecasts, negotiate better rates, and make decisions on electrical capacity and quality to help avoid unscheduled shutdowns. (For more, click here.)

"Within the next few months we expect to see a host of new products coming to market that are SNMP/Ethernet based [and] will enable a plant/facility manager to better understand the real-time power quality they are seeing on site," says Jack Pouchet, director/marketing at MGE UPS Systems Inc. Monitoring would cover "incoming power, transients, system load, reserve capacity, battery plant/fuel cell status, and overall heath of their plugged-in equipment." (For more, click here.) (Superior power quality comes at a low cost with MGE's EPS 6000 Online 800 kVA UPS.)

Motor efficiency has been improving since the 1990s. NEMA recently took another step in this direction, introducing its NEMA Premium standard. These motors bring "improved efficiency resulting in lower operating costs, lower noise, cooler running [and] longer life," observes John Caroff, marketing manager/NEMA motors at Siemens Energy & Automation. "The advantage to the USA is lower energy consumption that results in less demand on our taxed power distribution system." Coupling NEMA Premium motors with adjustable speed drives reduces energy use even more. Despite the increased difficulty of improving electric motor efficiency, "new materials, manufacturing techniques and technologies are still evolving," states Caroff, pointing to winding equipment, winding insulation systems, magnetic bearings, and electrical grade steel. (For more, click here.)

According to John Van Gorp, marketing manager/industrial systems at Power Measurement, "studies have shown that businesses can typically experience an additional 10% in energy savings by using an enterprise energy management (EEM) system to support an ongoing measurement and verification program." EEM systems provide plant and facility managers the "detailed information necessary to verify the savings from equipment upgrades," Van Gorp explains, and identify which loads "should be rescheduled or automatically controlled to reduce or eliminate peaks in the demand for power that can incur huge penalties from the utility." (For more, click here.)

Other advances include the "introduction of cost-effective power and energy analyzers with harmonic analysis and load profiling capability and also with alarms management software," Dudici adds.

From the utility perspective, "EAM solutions help drive operational excellence and increase return on assets," says Gary Frazier, director/corporate communications at Indus International. With EAM comes "higher system reliability due to shorter planned outages, fewer unplanned outages," and steadier performance. (For more, click here.)

Demand continues to grow for remote controlled systems supporting reciprocating gas compressors and equipment, according to GE Power Systems. This technology gives customers a "more centralized ability to monitor their equipment," GE says. (For more, click here.)

Loucks points to meters that can "transmit from behind company firewalls to central servers," and audits that track reliability issues and "provide a customer with an estimate of '9s' based on current condition and topology of system," and partial discharge sensing technology.

Meanwhile, the "addition of electronic variable-speed drives to centrifugal chillers, pumps, and fans is a proven energy saver," according to Ian Spanswick, product manager/Applied Chiller Group at York International Corp. "The latest generation of VSDs designed specifically for HVAC applications" makes retrofitting existing systems possible. (For more, click here.)

R & D: What's New, What's Ahead

"R & D is being conducted on innovative interconnection and control technology," says Linnea Brush, senior research analyst at Darnell Group, with the goal of "developing and demonstrating cost-effective universal plug-and play interconnection products, software, and communication solutions" for distributed and cogeneration systems. "The U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory have identified the near-term interconnection R & D needs to focus on transfer switches, paralleling switchgear, dispatch, communication, controls, power conversion, metering and monitoring, relays and protective relaying." (For more, click here.)

Universal plug-and-play technology could "reduce the need for custom designs for different distributed and cogeneration technologies and manufacturers," Brush continues, with cost savings projected at 15-20% in the short term.

Fuel cell technology will be another R & D magnet as the "cost of the core technology declines," predicts Pouchet. "President Bush has made the hydrogen economy a major part of his environmental initiative and we see this technology going mainstream in 2004 with commercial field trials and full scale production by late 2004 to early 2005."

Companies increasingly turn to sources outside the grid to meet at least some of their power needs, including distributed generation (DG), cogeneration, fuel cell technology, and isolated power.

Distributed generation (DG) allows companies to "produce electricity at or near the point of use, rather than acquiring it only from large, remote central power plants," comments Charles Curtis, vp finance/head of DG Group at Northern Power Systems, cost effectively generating "clean, full-time power on site from a range of technologies -- turbines, engines, fuel cells, photovoltaic panels -- powered by natural gas, biogas, propane, hydrogen, and solar and wind energy." DG technology also can "operate in 'parallel' with the main grid, providing some of the power required . . . while the grid provides the rest," Curtis continues. "In the event of an outage, the more advanced DG systems have the ability to isolate themselves almost instantaneously and continue to power critical systems in an office, factory, or home. Alternatively, when called upon, the advanced systems can also provide support to the grid to counter instability problems such as voltage sags and surges." (For more, click here.)

Facility and plant managers will soon "look to a complete balance of system design to include local [photovoltaics] as a roofing/building alternative and wind where prevailing conditions favor placement," Pouchet tells IEN. "These types of systems may have a high initial purchase/deployment cost CapEX but will have significantly improved operating expenses."

Adds ABB Power Technologies' Mary G. Flieller: "With the various highly publicized blackouts and the press-reported shortage of power generation in many regions and at many of the electric utilities, the bigger industrial companies with heavy power consumption will look more and more to looking outside their normal electric utility for backup power." High peak electrical costs have hastened this trend. "Depending on the size and sensitivity of their processes to poor power quality, this backup power will take many different forms, from onsite cogeneration to . . . fuel cell technology," Fieller believes. And sectors such as chip manufacturing and pharmaceuticals are "much more likely to spend significant money" on power quality to avoid downtime. (For more, click here.)