Manufacturer Recognizes Sustainability Improvements in Water Monitoring

One of the world’s largest auto parts manufacturing companies wanted to address industry and corporate sustainability goals:

As automakers look to meet sustainability goals, many are establishing sustainability requirements for vendors, adding additional motivation for the parts manufacturer to implement smart factory initiatives that improve its sustainability profile. In this case, the parts manufacturer needed to capture asset-level data from its chiller and chilled water loop.
 

Challenge

To accomplish this goal, the parts manufacturer needed considerably more visibility into its water consumption. Moreover, the manufacturer needed an end-to-end energy management solution that could gather, analyze and leverage sensor data from infrastructure and equipment, providing visibility to full site and asset specific water consumption.

Solution

NextEra 360 established “full facility” utility monitoring for the parts manufacturer, as well as monitoring of identified top power users across the facility and production equipment, enabling data to be analyzed and presented in a meaningful way via the customer portal.

The parts manufacturer leveraged the NextEra 360 Connect data capture and turnkey energy management solution to increase operational efficiency, reduce costs and accelerate progress towards sustainability goals. NextEra 360 provides flexible solutions, including customizable hardware, that can be easily integrated with a wide range of energy assets, smart meters, and building management systems to unlock insights into energy consumption, emissions impacts, and savings opportunities.

The first step in the NextEra 360 integration was to collect and analyze existing data feeds and add sensors to equipment where necessary to establish facility and asset energy consumption baselines. Then, NextEra 360’s proprietary algorithms consolidated data from across the site, providing near real-time full facility electrical load, water, natural gas, and compressed air monitoring, as well as electrical submetering capabilities for top energy users including its compressed air system. Data was displayed in a customizable dashboard for the client.

Result

With NextEra 360 in place and water consumption benchmarks established, the parts manufacturer was able to identify a significant spike in water usage on one of their assets. An investigation unearthed a blowback valve stuck in the open position resulting in water being lost at a rate of 720 gallons per hour. Because the blowback valve is an internal piece of equipment, and there was no water leaking onto the factory floor, the lead wasn’t immediately visible.

Without the asset level visibility, it would have likely gone undetected until the next water utility bill arrived. Utilizing baselines and data monitoring in near real-time, the NextEra 360 platform was able to provide a water consumption alert to the parts manufacturer so it could quickly address an issue it didn’t know existed, conserving approximately 12,480 cubic feet of water and avoiding an unusually high utility bill.