Are your refrigeration plants costing you millions?

THE CHALLENGE

Refrigeration typically accounts for 30% of energy costs

It can sometimes feel that refrigeration power consumption is an uncontrolled cost centre. Power consumption can vary significantly with weather conditions, production changes, operator, and maintenance input (or lack of same!).

 The following are some of the issues which typically cause excessive energy consumption in brewery refrigeration plants:

• Using simple energy KPI’s (kWh’s per hL) that do not highlight either energy losses or savings opportunities during dynamic conditions i.e. weather changes, production increases/decreases or product mix changes
• No real understanding of how production modifications (e.g. changes to product mix) can vary energy consumption
• Insufficient automation in place
• Automation switched off (maybe only temporarily to begin with) and plants running in manual
• Plants not dynamically adapting to changing weather and production conditions
• Plant equipment consuming more power and water than designed to, due to lack of maintenance or incorrect installation.

THE SOLUTION

Build digital models and feed them live data

Building models of individual refrigeration system components will give you an accurate view of the overall refrigeration plant performance. Then, you will start to see deviations between the actual and predicted (over time) performance as the plant conditions start to change i.e.

• Condensers foul
• Air ingress occurs on the low temperature side
• Compressors degrade
• Oil carries over to evaporators
• Automation switched off and compressor sequencing not as it should be.

The solution lets you: