Key points
As Alain Hermans, Process Industry Strategy & Marketing Manager for EMEA at Rockwell Automation explains, industry leaders are harnessing automation, digitalisation, and cybersecurity to enhance efficiency, reduce CO2 emissions, and work towards net-zero targets.
According to the World Economic Forum (WEF) figures, industry significantly contributes to global energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, accounting for 40 percent of global energy use and 30 percent of GHG emissions.
The WEF also predicts that global power consumption will continue to grow rapidly, increasing by over 300% by 2050. The resultant surge in energy costs will increase the pressure on organisations to aggressively optimise energy consumption and reduce this environmental danger.
Energy is one of the most significant costs in process and manufacturing industries and controlling its use benefits profitability and sustainability. Before any improvements can be made, it is very important to understand where and how energy is being used, and towards what level of output, therefore, the foundation of an effective energy management program lies in improved energy usage awareness.
Understanding where, when, and how energy is consumed enables organisations to strategically target energy savings and establish key performance metrics, paving the way for cost management and sustainable operations.
In the era of energy transition, traditional process industries face the dual challenge of enhancing sustainability while maintaining profitability. As these industries navigate complex market dynamics and regulatory pressures, the role of Lifecycle Services (LCS) has evolved from mere maintenance to being a strategic enabler.
LCS is an important strategy for optimising asset performance, reducing environmental impact, and driving cost efficiency. By integrating advanced digital tools and analytics, LCS providers empower organisations to achieve their sustainability goals without compromising financial returns, positioning themselves as indispensable partners in the journey towards business and environmental sustainability.
Overcoming workforce gaps with production automation
While most production floors are highly automated, responding to high energy costs driven by regulatory shifts, drives the need for high-context automation and digitalisation.
The ability to better record, control, and improve your energy usage, accompanied by a shift towards hybrid energy models can optimise the allocation of the CAPEX, prioritising both efficiency and safety improvements on the pathway to meet sustainability goals.
However, there is a significant roadblock to a low-carbon future in the shifting context of what it means to have a skilled workforce. These workforce constraints limit the speed at which companies can optimise, expand, or implement control systems to ensure environmental goals are achieved cost-effectively without significant downtime or introducing risks.
To overcome this challenge, customers are looking at automation suppliers for support in a transition plan for their legacy control systems to ensure risk-free optimisation and migration. This risk-free solution can be achieved through feed studies and effective consulting from corporate net-zero strategy to project implementation.
When it comes to seeking the support and advice, there are several pitfalls to avoid. At the top of the list is to ensure that whoever is guiding your strategy has sufficient knowledge and expertise in your industrial sector. Many companies provide consulting without remediation services.
Domain experience is a crucial factor in all facets of automation and optimisation, and this is where the vendor of the process control system has a significant advantage through their project engineers and already optimised systems.
Automation and digital solutions for net-zero ambitions
While increased automation is a key part of ant strategy for achieving sustainability goals, it is just one piece of the puzzle regarding reducing and optimising energy usage and lowering CO2 releases. Process control systems' vast amount of data, from the plant floor to the boardroom, requires contextualisation, particularly about KPIs aligned with net-zero objectives. Therefore, integrating more automation must be coupled with a strategy that emphasises measuring, controlling, and improving processes based on a comprehensive, end-to-end implementation plan.
Organisations increasingly turn to upfront simulations to predict potential outcomes, assess plant modifications, and understand their impact on current production rates and overall plant efficiency to ensure that CAPEX is allocated effectively. This approach helps ensure that investments significantly reduce CO2 emissions without compromising production efficiency or the safety of personnel and assets.
Digitalisation complements this strategy by transforming raw data into meaningful, actionable reports and dashboards. This enables constant performance review and proactive planning for preventative maintenance, ensuring alignment with goals.
The role of the automation supplier is pivotal in this process, as they not only implement the process control technology but also help optimise production and translate data into actionable insights.
Integrating safety and cybersecurity for an uninterrupted energy transition
A third crucial aspect in the journey toward a low carbon future is ensuring safer production, especially by incorporating new technologies like carbon capture utilisation and storage (CCUS) and green hydrogen.
The effective use of data is increasingly pivotal in decision-making, making data accuracy indispensable. As customers seek open platforms for unified reporting across diverse data sources, robust cybersecurity becomes paramount to safeguard continuous, safe production. Any system must be user-friendly for operators while remaining secure against malicious attacks and accidental errors by inexperienced personnel.
Automation suppliers typically offer tailored solutions to ensure cybersecurity regulations and standards compliance. However, it is vital to recognise that cybersecurity cannot be an afterthought in the transformation process; it must be embedded into the project design from the outset and span the entire value chain. This includes continuous online monitoring, essential to the sustainability journey.
Cybersecurity is not a one-time task but a continuous evolution, supported by the automation supplier, to ensure the plant operates safely, meets its goals, and maintains high operability levels.
Reducing variability to boost efficiency and lower Scope 1 emissions
The fourth and final piece of the puzzle centers on optimising existing production facilities by minimising variability across various subprocesses. This optimisation reduces energy consumption through faster throughput, less waste, and increased production flexibility.
Many plants continue to operate as they did when first commissioned, often overlooking the impact of aging assets and changes in overall plant design. Collaborating with the automation vendor offers a strategic path to reduce CAPEX requirements. By maximising production throughput and minimising process variability, plants can achieve higher yields and better quality while lowering energy consumption and emissions.
Modernising assets may not always be an option for customers constrained by limited CAPEX or physical space. In such cases, embedding services from the automation vendor into the overall strategy can free up resources. This approach not only accelerates production output but also enhances production processes, significantly contributing to the achievement of low-carbon goals.
Empowering sustainable manufacturing with FactoryTalk Energy Manager
Last year Rockwell Automation introduced FactoryTalk® Energy Manager™, an advanced energy monitoring application built on an IT/OT convergence platform. This innovative solution provides comprehensive energy and production insights by modelling energy usage at various levels, from plant-wide processes to specific processes and equipment.
By utilising FactoryTalk Energy Manager, operators can understand when, where and how energy is consumed, enabling them to drive targeted energy-saving efforts.
FactoryTalk Energy Manager is powered by FactoryTalk® DataMosaix™, an Industrial DataOps solution for multi-site, enterprise-wide access. This platform offers flexible and scalable tools that accelerate data usability for domain experts and analysts, allowing manufacturers to make informed decisions based on relevant, contextualised data. This capability is vital for meeting environmental goals and advancing sustainability initiatives.
Aligned with ESG standards, FactoryTalk Energy Manager's strategy focuses on achieving three core outcomes: sustainable customers, companies, and communities. An energy management strategy is vital to supporting the transition toward widespread electrification and decarbonisation.
The FactoryTalk Energy Manager solution helps customers integrate data from various sources, including energy, water, and production data, and provides essential functionalities to monitor and analyse consumption, demand, intensity, costs, and emissions. It also enables the comparison of assets, identification of savings opportunities, and forecasting key organisational indicators for sustainability.
By contextualising energy data with production data, executing intelligent energy assessments, and conducting data or asset correlations to detect inefficiencies or anomalies, FactoryTalk Energy Manager empowers equipment operators to visualise the data required to drive decisions connected with their sustainability goals.
The solution leverages industrial DataOps to optimise energy usage through contextualised analytics, reducing energy costs and enhancing efficiency and regulatory compliance across the value chain.
