Supply chains are only slowly recovering after the pandemic, and we are already facing a new reality as a result of Russia's attack on Ukraine. The framework conditions for energy-intensive industries are extremely poor, and companies' concerns are growing when looking at electricity and gas prices. There is an unprecedented urgency to debate which adjustments should be made first in order to reduce gas and electricity consumption and thus save costs.
Energy management is a complex topic, and the deeper you delve into the subject, the more obvious the strong interconnectedness of many different areas becomes. However, the potential for improvement also becomes tangible, offering opportunities for active influence. In principle, it can be said that, that there is still room for optimisation in every production process, in every material processing operation and in almost every location. Whether plastics processing, mechanical engineering or food production - the Freiburg-based company Enit serves a wide variety of customers from different sectors, and yet they all have one thing in common: high energy consumption, the associated high costs and the desire to optimise them.
The common starting point varies from customer to customer. While for some customers, in-house energy generation or dynamic load control play a major role, for others the foundations for modern, transparent energy data collection and a sensible measurement concept be placed.
Breaking new ground pays off, because the average potential savings in energy costs following the introduction of an energy management system is five to 20 per cent. Experience reports show that this potential is usually recognisable in avoidable load peaks, unnoticed standby loads and transformer losses. Accurate data collection and the resulting transparency are always the first important step.
In addition, the desire for in-house power generation and independence from rising global electricity prices is becoming ever stronger among industrial decision-makers. Every decision to switch to in-house power generation is preceded by comprehensive energy monitoring, which shows the current status of the entire energy network within the company and thus forms the basis for well-founded measures towards more efficient energy management.
This was the case for a company in the food industry with an annual electricity consumption of around five gigawatt hours: Before working with Enit, the company had little transparency regarding consumption. The available load profile data and the individual meters were analysed in a complex process with the help of standard office software. It quickly became apparent, that a modernisation of the energy monitoring system was necessary, which was then implemented using the Enit Agent - a hardware component - and corresponding software.
Thanks to real-time data and the simplified evaluation of energy consumption This made it possible to recognise major savings potential. Within the first three months alone, switching off one transformer saved around 88,000 euros per year. The reason for the high energy consumption: the transformers connected in parallel were loaded very unevenly, which led to increased standby losses.
How was the cause resolved? The meters already present at the site at system level were integrated into the Enit Agent together with the billing-relevant transfer meter. By measuring at medium and low-voltage level, it was possible to detect transformer losses. The company gained transparency regarding its energy consumption and was able to identify unnecessary loads and incorrectly set reactive current compensators. In addition, the manual maintenance of the data in the standard software became superfluous thanks to the integration of the measurement data into the Enit Agent software, which in turn led to significant time savings.
Another example from everyday working life at Enite shows that, building on the monitoring Further costs can be saved with intelligent load control. A provider of sustainable packaging solutions received an exorbitant electricity bill the previous year due to an unusually high peak load and high grid charges. Organisational measures were only effective to a limited extent and the load shedding system already installed was working incorrectly with an outdated algorithm.
The aim was now to use the transparency already gained with the Enit Agent to first identify flexible consumers in order to then develop a Modern, software-based load management introduce.
By installing the intelligent load management system Enit Act, the peak load was reduced by around nine per cent from 520 kilowatts to 480 kilowatts, which saves the customer around 5,800 euros a year. The future viability of the system will also be demonstrated as soon as the customer puts the planned fleet of electric vehicles into operation this year: Charging the vehicles poses a risk of new load peaks as additional power consumption, but the dynamic load management system means that these consumers can also be regulated using software to avoid unnecessary costs.
The energy manager of the southern German company looks back: „The year before, we had a much higher peak load than usual. That was very expensive for us.“ Thanks to the software, the origin of the load peak could be determined. He summarises with satisfaction: „Enit has installed an appropriate load management system. We were able to reduce the peak load by nine per cent.“
Enit has been working for years to optimise energy use in industrial companies and is constantly delivering new solutions. As a research-orientated company that also works closely with medium-sized industry, the growing team has expanded its original core activity of energy data acquisition expanded with the next steps to reduce emissions and costs - This also includes free applications such as a CO₂ emissions calculator and a photovoltaic check to verify the profitability of the company's own photovoltaic system.
