Creating the Smart, Sustainable Factory

In 2020, Schneider Electric’s Lexington,
Ky., facility—a 60-year-old
brownfield facility where safety
switches and circuit breakers are produced—
was recognized as a “Lighthouse
Factory” by the World Economic
Forum (WEF), which, together with
McKinsey & Company in 2018, created
the Global Lighthouse Network initiative.
“Lighthouse Factories” are companies
that effectively use Industry 4.0
technologies to drive digital transformation.
As a result, these companies
are recognized as beacons for others
to follow.

The Lexington factory’s digital
energy management strategy leverages
IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things)
connectivity with power meters and
predicative analytics to capture greater
energy consumption granularity and
optimize energy costs. As a result,
the company has been able to reduce
energy use by 26%, net CO2 by 30%,
and water use by 20%. Based on that
progress, the Schneider Electric factory
was selected by WEF in 2021 as
one of only three facilities in the world
to be named a “Sustainability Lighthouse.”

“It’s a testament to the work we’ve been
doing in Lexington, and a reflection of the
broader Schneider mission,” said Luke Durcan,
Schneider Electric’s director of the
company’s EcoStruxure platform. “We have
been on the decarbonization sustainability
path for many years.”

Decarbonization is part of the company’s
commitment to Sustainable Development
Goals (SDGs), a universal call to action by the
United Nations which outlines a collection of
17 interlinked global goals designed to be a
“blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable
future for all.” Schneider Electric is
engaged in efforts to accomplish all 17 SDGs,
as well as five sustainability megatrends
related to climate, the circular economy, ethics,
health and equity, and development.

For its core business, Schneider is transitioning
to more electric, digital, decarbonized,
and decentralized energy. The company
notes that it is committed to carbon neutrality
at its sites and in its ecosystem by 2030.
“As a manufacturer of things, this is aggressive,”
Durcan said.

As aggressive as Schneider Electric’s
actions around sustainability are, more companies
are following a similar path. According
to a Capgemini Research Institute report
on sustainable operations, of the 960 executives
surveyed, 91% aim to achieve 100%
renewable electricity and 87% plan to be
carbon neutral by 2040.

Achieving this, however, takes intent and
technology. “We have a decarbonization pathway
which is a four-stage, 12-point plan to
understand the baseline and set targets,” Durcan
said. And Schneider Electric uses some of
its own technology to understand the actual
base level in the plant. This technology includes
its PowerLogic power meters, the EcoStruxure
Power Monitoring Expert energy visualization
and analysis tools that collect metering and
machine data at the control layer, and Aveva
Insight—a cloud platform that uses artificial
intelligence to create actionable information
to improve asset reliability and operational
performance from enterprise systems, MES
(manufacturing execution systems), time
series, and non-sequential energy data.

Schneider Electric says its manufacturing
customers are using the same technologies
for their own sustainability initiatives. “To say
there’s been an explosion in the last 12 months
is an understatement,” Durcan said. “There’s
been a seismic shift in people’s decarbonization
efforts.”

But this move to energy efficiency and
carbon neutrality does not come naturally,
and manufacturers need a lot of help when it
comes to getting started.

Letting off steam

A common question is: “Where do I start?”
And a common answer is, “Start by doing an
assessment on where the greatest gains can
come from with the least amount of effort,”
said Nathan Hedrick, national product manager
at Endress+Hauser. “Typically, I find
that some of the biggest energy consumers
are compressed air and steam where small
changes can lead to big savings.”

Indeed, industry experts agree that steam,
compressed air, and electromechanical systems
are the biggest culprits when it comes
to wasted energy. Fortunately, relatively easy
fixes exist for these issues as long as you can
measure energy use in these areas first.

Endress+Hauser makes field instruments
to measure and monitor the flow,
level, pressure, and temperature of liquids.
“These instruments are the eyes and ears
into the process and are important to sustainability
efforts because they can generate
baselines that can be monitored, measured,
and reported on to see trends,” said Mark
Thomas, Endress+Hauser’s industry marketing
group manager.

Sean Silvey, product application specialist
with Fluke Corp., a supplier of electrical
test and measurement tools, agrees that an
energy assessment is a good first step. “But in
energy, there isn’t a body of research for an
industrial plant manager to use to set baselines
for what ‘reasonable’ energy usage looks
like in a manufacturing facility. So how do you
assess what portion of current energy usage
is reasonable and what is wasteful? Or, of that wasteful portion, what provides high enough
ROI (return on investment) to address? The
ROI under discussion here is the cost per
kilowatt hour as charged by the utility.”

Fluke’s power quality and energy analyzers
troubleshoot power quality issues and
discover the cost of wasted energy. Multiple
parameters are measured simultaneously and
displayed in formats that quickly describe
overall power quality health. And understanding
energy waste points is key. “Every system
and operation has the potential to be a point
of waste that can be mitigated or remedied,”
Silvey said. “The goal is to map the energy use
of specific equipment and processes to look
at where energy is being wasted to quantify
the waste and prioritize improvements or
replacements based on life of the equipment,
as well as which modifications can deliver the
best return on investment.”

Silvey’s “energy efficiency checklist” starts
with a profile of energy use and then traces
the energy consumption to understand
energy waste points. He warns that manufacturers
should not try to manage every
kilowatt consumed by the facility, but instead
divide the facility by electrical infrastructure
and key systems. “The understanding of basic
energy components enables an electrician to
set up energy logging equipment to measure
overall levels and quality of consumption and
then trace when energy is consumed by what.
The biggest power savings come from determining
when power usage peaks, evaluating
overall power consumption compared to utility
invoices, and possibly rebalancing loads.”

By power logging each major system
and mapping those costs against utility bills
to quantify where and when consumption
occurs, companies can often realize savings
by simple operational and schedule changes,
Silvey said.

Measuring for more output

There are other ways to measure energy use
beyond checking the utility bill, and it starts
with collecting the data from an energy meter
connected to an equipment component—a
conveyor or a pump, for example—and putting
it into a historian as a way to maintain the
history of the equipment to look for optimizations.
“As you monitor it over time, using a
dashboard, you then have a data set and can
use analytics to get efficiency,” said Gimmi
Filice, senior product manager at GE Digital.

In addition to historians, MES software can
be tied to facility management software to
determine when different lines are idle and
can be powered down. A large automotive
manufacturer using GE Digital’s Proficy MES
software saved 10-15% on energy usage just
by looking at what lines were not running during
certain hours in the evening, dimming the
lights, and shutting off high energy equipment,
Filice said.

Other customers are taking digital transformation
tools to another level, like using
artificial intelligence and digital twin technology
to make predictions of how equipment
will perform. According to GE Digital,
a steel, chemicals, and cement conglomerate
in Southwest China turned to Proficy
CSense (analytics software that improves
asset performance using a process digital
twin) to optimize control of its energy-intensive cement cooler process. By analyzing the
data, new insights were gained about variation
in the cement cooler’s performance. A
digital twin model enabled them to predict
how process input changes would affect the
cement cooler’s performance.

Though looking at a portion of data may
help tweak a machine or a line, it does not
provide the holistic view needed to truly optimize
energy use. “I’ve often found that our
own instrumentation has a lot more unlocked
potential in the form of unused data that
users do not fully leverage to their benefit,”
said Endress+Hauser’s Hedrick.

That is where new kinds of manufacturing
data-capturing technologies are coming into
play. An example being Sight Machine, a platform
that converts unstructured plant data
into a standardized data foundation.

“A manufacturer should know how many
units it’s producing and how much energy it’s
using, but they need to dial down to see where
it’s being used to get to the level of not just
plant or line efficiency, but asset efficiency,”
said Matt Smith, senior vice president, digital
transformation for Sight Machine.

Sight Machine features tools, called “cookbooks,”
that contain recipes for products.
Using this information, Sight Machine can
determine the most efficient way to make
these products using statistical weighing.
“Cookbooks look through all of the historical
data and, based on conditions—be it humidity,
raw materials, etc.—give you your best set
of running conditions using as little water as
possible, for example,” says Smith.

Schneider Electric’s Durcan agrees that
the ability to track resource and energy use,
not just at the plant level but at the product
level, is important. The Lexington plant, for
example, is a high-volume, low-mix facility,
and when you are producing products the
same way every day, managing the resources
is straightforward. But that’s rarely the case.
“You need to associate the resources with
the actual product flowing through the facility.
We have to think not just about what a
plant does on a week-to-week or year-to-year
basis, but how to optimize them,” he said.

That means broadening the scope beyond
what is happening in the plant to include the
extended supply chain. It can be difficult to
collect all that data, but it is an important
aspect of measuring energy use. “In the past
we’d go to the ERP system to see what standard
and variable costs were and see where it
is cheaper to produce product, which was all
based on cost. Now, we are genuinely looking
at our supply chain based on carbon and
resources, and that is a different proposition,”
Durcan said. “Cost is not a reflection of carbon
and energy produced.”

There are numerous aspects to understanding
energy use, and there is no one approach
that works for all cases. To address this, many
manufacturing technology suppliers, like
Schneider Electric, have formed consulting
groups to help companies establish baselines
and measurements. But to be successful, there
needs to be “strategic corporate intent,” Durcan
said. “Everyone is at a different point on
the journey; make sure you are strategic about
what the objectives are first.”
Fluke’s three-phase power
quality analyzers capture
hundreds of power quality
parameters to ensure
critical power quality
events are never missed.