PROCESS EQUIPMENT UPDATE
MEETING YOUR ENERGY NEEDS
Guillaume Braillard from Watlow discusses how to strike a balance between demand flexibility and supply availability when electrifying a process plant
Q
uestions around electrification are more practical than they once were. For example, one of
the first questions asked at the start of an electrification project is whether the local utility grid can handle an increased load. This is not simply a question of power availability, but of balancing power demand and supply.
WILL A GRID MEET A PLANT’S ENERGY NEEDS? This question is trickier than it first appears because the amount of power supplied by the grid, and the amount of power demanded by the process in question, fluctuate over
08
www.engineerlive.com
time. Issues arise not because the equipment exceeds the grid’s capacity, but because when multiple pieces of equipment run at peak capacity, it passes a threshold at a time when the grid cannot adequately support the demand. The increasing loads that
electrification projects place on the grid have spurred the call for better demand flexibility. On one hand, utility companies can take a much more moderate approach when it comes to adding generation capacity or making expensive upgrades to the grid. On the other hand, facilities reap the benefits of better cost control and more in- depth data analysis. This win-win scenario assumes
that plants are willing to invest in the kind of power control necessary to implement demand flexibility across processes, and throughout the plant as a whole. Specifically, it requires using modern power controllers that have Predictive Load Management (PLM) capabilities across a network.
ADVANCED POWER CONTROL PLM is one of the key technologies for demand flexibility in process power control and consists of two main functions, load balancing (or load sharing) and load shedding. Load balancing involves equally distributing power of different loads to obtain an overall power consumption that is
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48
