Power quality and energy consumption are closely linked to overall building performance. Yet building managers are often more focused on mechanical equipment operations. Moreover, power problems are responsible for more than half of the equipment downtime in most buildings.

While disruptions can impact productivity and safety, energy waste and equipment failures can also affect the financial performance of a business.

Source: Schneider

Customer challenges:

High penalties for electrical bills due to over-demand or power quality issues become one of the many challenges a company faces. Limited knowledge of monitoring energy consumption may incur extra expenses for the company when they do not fully utilise the allocated energy.

It is not only time-consuming for the technician to collect all the energy consumption data from digital power meters around the facility, but they would also need to interpret, understand, and analyse the collected data and tally with the electricity bill every month. This process is not only prone to human error but is also lengthy and requires staffing, ultimately increasing operational costs.

Power quality issues such as harmonics, voltage sag and swell or transient will cause equipment to malfunction or break down. Without any data, it is still critical to determine the causes of power outages or equipment breakdowns. Every checking and rectifying process must be done manually, extending the production downtime, and incurring considerable losses to the company.

XtructureD Solution: The Future of Power Management

EcoStruxure Power Monitoring Expert (PME) gives insight into the electrical system’s health and energy efficiency, allowing users to make informed decisions for improved performance.

With its open and scalable architecture, PME can connect to smart devices across the electrical system – power and energy meters, protective relays and circuit breakers, RTUs and PLCs, VSDs, UPS, and PQ mitigation equipment – and integrate with process control systems and many other enterprise platforms.

EcoStruxure PME assists in converting data to actions. With its customisable and intuitive web interface, PME allows real-time power and equipment monitoring. The user can track KPIs for energy and reliability or share energy, sustainability, and PQ metrics with stakeholders. Users can also apply advanced power quality analysis to ensure reliable network operation, equipment performance, and reduced network outages.

PME has a reinvented alarm management with smart events and alarms clustering for intuitive and powerful filtering, searching and categorising events and alarms. It comes with graphical timeline analysis tools that easily allow analysis of events and alarms sequence, location and potential impact. It has the most advanced energy visualisation and analysis tools to calculate, model, forecast and track the main energy performance indicators (EnPIs).

Benefits

PME is able to integrate all measurement data, such as digital power meters, sensors, pressure, gas, etc., into one monitoring platform. All data can be viewed and printed into reports with a click of a button. PME will change the conventional way of manually collecting data one by one, which will help to decrease the needed manpower while reducing human error.

PME provides visibility to help users validate electricity bills by using trending and energy modelling to identify abnormal energy usage and other utilities (WAGES). It helps to determine if there are any TNB penalties such as maximum demand that has occurred. With these data, not only can users identify the problem areas and devise a solution, but this will prevent any overuse of energy and avoid any penalties from TNB.

With all the measurement data in hand, users can identify which area uses excessive energy, abnormal usage, etc. This helps users understand the facility, enabling them to devise energy-saving proposals quickly. Data can also support this proposal, which eases the management’s approval. PME also helps to validate how much energy is saved when an energy-saving plan is in action. All these data are at the user’s fingertips.

PME helps to optimise the business liability and continuality by understanding the root cause and impact of power system issues such as power outages or equipment breakdown. It can send alarm notifications to users via email or SMS, indicating that a problem has occurred. This helps maintenance or technical personnels to access the problem areas faster without having to check everything.

PME helps to monitor and identify power quality issues and allows users to take action to rectify the problems. This helps to minimise unscheduled downtime and reduce maintenance costs by decreasing equipment breakdown.

PME helps to keep both people and assets safe. It allows users to monitor and detect abnormal conditions, such as rising busbar temperatures, abnormal current pull by motor, etc., that represent a safety and operations risk. It also analyses and tracks the state and parameters of the electrical network over time to prevent any accidents or disruptions in the business. It helps analyse equipment performance to support proactive maintenance, extend lifespan, and reveal unused system capacity to avoid upgrading or overbuilding. This assists in reducing costs and maximising operational lifecycle efficiency.

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