The energy management and engineering partnership with automation is often overlooked and under cultivated. Your automation representative should be one of your closest allies - this partnership is critical in effective and efficient implementation of operations and controls related initiatives. Inadequate implementation of energy initiatives can not only cause abandoning the project, or worse unexpected increases in energy consumption, it can also give the overall energy program a bad reputation causing the ability to implement future projects more difficult.
It is common for energy efficiency initiatives to be incorporated in a facility design, only for them to go un-optimized or even worse unused or bypassed in the final commissioning and/or by the end user after handover. A common cause of this is a failure in communication between the designer, automation resource, and project & area owners. While this might be down to unclear or ineffective project specifications, sometimes it is just down to ensuring all parties understand what the end goal is. We’ll walk through several case studies of such initiatives.