Background
The mill is located East Canada and has over 350 employees at its site. The facility produces multiple grades,thicknesses and sizes of particleboard melamine panels and has an annual production capacity of more than 435 million square feet (650 000 m³), 5/8 inch basis. Average yearly temperature of this location is 2 C.
Expedition Area Overview
Measures
The Energy Efficiency solution implemented consisted of a group of energy reduction measures throughout the plant. The projects targeted were mostly optimization of the existing equipment. The Opnor service contract included detailed engineering, project management, configuration of a new optimization server, start-up, commissioning, training, system follow-up and fine tuning. A partial list of the measures is as follows;
- Implementation of a new EMS following ISO-50001 recommandations;
- Power management system and the addition of some critical equipment for continuous monitoring of the instantaneous power consumption of the plant;
- to modulate large motors of multiple processes during prolonged production interruption and downtime;
Motors downtime modulation by production area
To ensure recurring savings on a long term basis, the control approach is designed with EcoSuite, a real time energy management system that continuously models, tracks and maintains the lowest possible energy and utility service costs. The Energy Efficiency / EcoSuite system allows the mill:
- to continuously control energy costs and the minimum achievable benchmarks or good practices for current production and ambient conditions;
- to identify at any time the internal consumers (departments) that are not meeting their prescribed benchmarks;
- to generate alarms for critical parameters that quickly re-establish the required operating conditions that comply with the desired benchmarks;
- to develop baseline and benchmark (good practice) references;
- to generate daily HTML reports for management that are available through LAN/WAN.
Energy Management Daily Report Dashboard