Energy Monitoring System Improves Visibility

After integrating manufacturing capabilities across multiple Korean facilities in 1999, a subsidiary of a global manufacturer faced mounting pressure to improve energy efficiency and meet tightening environmental reporting requirements. Operating across electricity, natural gas, and steam as primary energy sources, the company lacked real-time visibility into how and where energy was consumed. Without a unified monitoring solution, operators depended on manual meter readings, making it impossible to respond promptly to consumption spikes or correlate energy use with production output. Additional government regulations around carbon dioxide emissions added urgency, exposing the operational and reputational cost of the status quo.

Rockwell Automation deployed an integrated energy monitoring system built on the FactoryTalk software suite. FactoryTalk VantagePoint Energy served as the central analytics layer, converting raw meter data from all three energy sources into shareable dashboards and actionable trend reports aligned with the ISO 50001 energy management standard. FactoryTalk Historian collected up to 10,000 data tags per line from Allen-Bradley ControlLogix L71 PLCs — spanning approximately 100,000 I/O points across facilities — capturing station temperature, humidity, CO₂ concentration, and other environmental metrics. FactoryTalk View Site Edition and ViewPoint provided redundant-server HMI visualization. Network connectivity was built on Stratix 5400 managed switches (layer 2/3 routing), Stratix 5700 compact managed switches with embedded Cisco technology, and Stratix 2000 unmanaged switches for plug-and-play flexibility. PowerMonitor 500 sub-metering devices delivered point-of-use energy data directly at monitoring sites, enabling at-process decisions without additional HMI hardware.

With the monitoring system live across all Korean facilities, the manufacturer projected an annual energy usage reduction of approximately 10 percent — realized by enabling operators to adjust system performance based on real-time consumption trends rather than reacting after the fact. System stability improved materially, with stabilized energy utilization driven by minimized unscheduled downtime and lower engineering and maintenance costs. Automated data collection replaced manual meter readings, freeing engineering resources for higher-value work.

• ~10% projected annual energy reduction through trend-based performance adjustments
• Enhanced system stability and reliability across all facilities
• Reduced unscheduled downtime and associated maintenance burden
• Automated reporting replacing manual meter reads, improving data accuracy and compliance readiness

• Establish visibility before optimizing: systematic data collection across all energy sources — electricity, gas, and steam — is the prerequisite for any credible energy management program.
• Structuring data collection around ISO 50001 from the outset simplifies government reporting and positions operations for environmental compliance without retrofit effort.
• Correlating energy data with production data reveals where efficiency improvements also reduce per-unit manufacturing costs.
• Sub-metering at the device level enables at-process decisions that aggregate plant-level monitoring consistently misses.
• Real-time alerting on selected consumption trends shifts operators from reactive to proactive energy management, compounding savings over time.