Requirements
Industrial applications often bring supplementary demands for an Energy Management with them. Besides the collection of consumption meters from the standpoint of the building automation this could be the following:
- Integration of production data in the Energy Management (energy consumption per unit or per produced unit)
- Cost center management within the organization (allocation of energy consumption on a cost center)
- Monitoring of power quality (power factor, peak loads, harmonics, …)
- Data integration from industrial control systems or SCADA systems
- Interfaces to heterogeneous systems of manu- facturing and building environment
Often there are collaborative real estate applications, i.e. nationwide or global distributed manufacturing facilities. Most of the time these systems have been evolved over years, so that a variety of different automation concepts can found (both, in the building and on the production). And all of them have to be integrated in the Energy Management.
Objectives
The objectives of energy management in industrial environment are often a mix of economic and ecological factors. The primary requirement is often the combination of cost transparency in combination with the develop- ment of potential savings. In the future the verification of energy data is getting an increasingly important role.
Already today, companies beyond a critical size must prove their CO2 emissions. Also, future tax benefits will be tied to proof of an energy management system; the requirements therefor are today already clear (e.g. DIN-EN 16001).
Implementation with meterKiT
The modules of the meterKiT product line are ideally suited for applications in industrial environments. The meterKiT-Box is used as a universal data gateway, both for con- sumption (for example M-Bus) as well as building automation (for example BACnet) as well as for industrial control systems (for example Modbus). The meterKiT Connector is – additionally or alternatively – for use when energy-related information is already collected at PC level.
The meterKiT Data Center can run either as a conventional service on a local server or hosted in the cloud (Software as a Service). The role based user authorization provides you the freedom to apply it according your company requirements (clients, user groups and types). Access to the meterKiT Data Center is granted via Web browser.
Especially in industrial applications, this brings many advantages with it and goes hand in hand with the high IT requirements locally (such as separate technique for office and equipment) and across property lines
(VPN technologies, firewalls etc.).
