Investment friendly energy management system

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Oct 13, 2003

PEP is a novel flexible automatic monitoring and full energy management system designed to allow companies to reduce the costs of lighting, HVAC and the operation of plant and machinery.

PEP, a new flexible automatic monitoring and full energy management system, is the essential tool to provide business with the 15 to 20% annual savings that are achievable simply by reducing the costs of lighting, HVAC and the operation of plant and machinery.

The result of a partnership between Citect and Moore Industries, the PEP plant energy profiler offers companies the flexibility to start with just a few meters to suit the investment available, yet can easily be expanded to handle the largest of installations, providing detailed analysis of cost per period to help users improve profitability.

"If you can measure your energy usage then you can effectively manage it and reduce costs", says Rob Stockham, General Manager of Moore Industries.

What all CEOs should realise is that savings made as a result of reductions in energy usage are a direct contribution to a company's bottom line.

Moreover, the investment that has to be made in energy management systems to realise this contribution is really quite low when one considers what a company would have to invest in its production facilities to realise an equivalent profit contribution".

The key advantage of the PEP system is that the initial investment need not be expensive or the equipment elaborate.

The modular nature of the system means that users can start with just a few meters, enough to enable them to prove the value of the system by obtaining a picture, pattern and costs of their energy usage.

Once this is achieved, the ability of PEP to grow from a very small installation to one of any size can be fully utilised, the system offering a huge capacity for handling meter/plant and facilities data if required.

The flexibility of PEP means that it can be installed either as a passive monitoring system, or, by using the powerful control and logic functionality provided by its CitectFacilities platform, as a full energy management system, offering advanced capabilities such as load shedding.

Whatever the system configuration employed, the provision within PEP of preconfigured meter pages provides easy-to-view real time information on electrical parameters, and the user also benefits from powerful features such as trending, alarming and the setting of maximum demand targets, together with costing schedules to provide detail analysis of cost per period on all meters installed.

In addition, the system also allows for full communication, and operability with existing business IT and communications infrastructure.

The modularity built into the PEP system means that it interfaces directly with Moore Industries PPM energy meters (electrical) and Moore Industries NCS (intelligent I/O), enabling collection of conventional pulses and other measured variables such as temperature (etc).

The overall system is also easy to use, courtesy of a scalable and powerful software platform based on Citect's new Facilities package, which has been developed into a specific application program.

"CitectFacilities is the ideal operating platform for PEP due to its advanced capabilities for customisation", commented Paul Hurst, MD of Citect Ltd UK.

"We have worked closely with Moore Industries to exploit these capabilities, developing a product that, by tracking and reporting parameters such as area wide energy use, significantly reduces business operating and maintenance costs.

We also enable the user to go further, exploiting the capabilities of the Citect Plant2Business interface in CitectFacilities to provide individualised billing for each production area on the basis of energy consumed".