Impact of an Energy Monitoring System on the Energy Efficiency of an Automobile Factory: A Case Study

• Published in: Energies (Basel) Vol. 13; no. 10; p. 2577
• Main Authors: Akhtar, Tehseen, Rehman, Asif Ur, Jamil, Mohsin, Gilani, Syed Omer
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.05.2020
• Subjects: Analyzers; Communication; Consumers; Cost control; Data acquisition; Data logging; Data transmission; Departments; Design; Developing countries; Energy conservation; Energy consumption; Energy efficiency; Energy industry; Energy management; energy monitoring; energy sector in developing countries; Environmental policy; Ethernet; Factories; Internet of Things; LDCs; Load; Logging; Manufacturing; Monitoring; Monitoring systems; power analysis; Power consumption; Power supply; Production capacity; Real time; Remote monitoring; Servers; Software; Supervisory control and data acquisition; Pakistan
• ISSN: 1996-1073; 1996-1073
• DOI: 10.3390/en13102577

Energy-saving strategies cannot be implemented without having detailed and regular power consumption data of a facility. The installation of an energy monitoring and data logging system can help in planning energy efficiency improvement policies by providing daily, monthly, and yearly energy consumption reports and graphs. The purpose of this study was to demonstrate the impact of an energy monitoring and management system on the improvement of energy efficiency in the industrial sector of developing countries. This study introduced an energy monitoring and data logging system installed in an automobile factory in Pakistan. Energy consumption data, which also included power quality data, were collected with the help of energy analyzers and transmitted to a centralized supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) software for data logging and monitoring purposes. This system was developed by combining Modbus with industrial Ethernet to communicate real-time energy consumption data of the factory to multiple local and remote locations. Monitoring and logging the real-time energy consumption data helped the user to find the significant energy losses inside the factory and to implement various energy conservation policies inside the facility, resulting in energy efficiency improvement. The energy consumption results indicate that the proposed system can help achieve an approximately 8% improvement in energy efficiency.