Energy Efficiency Application
Panel Board Mill
The mill is located East Canada and has over 350 employees at its site. The facility produces multiple grades,thicknesses and sizes of particleboard melamine panels and has an annual production capacity of more than 435 million square feet (650 000 m³), 5/8 inch basis. Average yearly temperature of this location is 2 C.
Solutions Implemented
The Energy Efficiency solution implemented consisted of a group of energy reduction measures throughout the plant. The projects targeted were mostly optimization of the existing equipment. The Opnor service contract included detailed engineering, project management, configuration of a new optimization server, start-up, commissioning, training, system follow-up and fine tuning. A partial list of the implemented solutions is as follows;
- Implementation of a new EMS following ISO-50001 recommendations;
- Power management system and the addition of some critical equipment for continuous monitoring of the instantaneous power consumption of the plant;
- To modulate large motors of multiple processes during prolonged production interruption and downtime;
To ensure recurrent savings on a long term basis, the control approach was designed with EcoSuite real time energy management system to continuously model, track and maintain the lowest possible energy and utility service costs. The EcoSuite system allows to:
- Continuously control energy costs and the minimum achievable benchmarks or good practices for current production and ambient conditions;
- Identify at any time the internal consumers (departments) that are not meeting their prescribed benchmarks;
- For critical parameter, alarms are generated to quickly re-establish the required operating conditions that comply with the desired benchmarks;
- Develop baseline and benchmark (good practice) references;
- Daily HTML report available through LAN/WAN for management.