Like many plant engineers, Dave Tracy and Jim Vyuerberg of Pharmacia Corporation vividly remember the times when clipboards and shoe leather were the key components in monitoring energy consumption. They and their colleagues had to trek all over the plant to scribble down power meter data, then manually enter it into a spreadsheet program. At Pharmacia?s Kalamazoo, Mich. plant, however, all that trekking and scribbling has been replaced by a power management system that saves time, cuts costs and preserves uptime.

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"I'm very happy we have this monitor now."  Victor Gaona reports to his Square D rep. Using the PowerLogic Portable Circuit Monitor, Victor solved the mystery of a ground fault at Paramount Farms in the San Joaquin Valley, CA.

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On the afternoon of the biggest power failure in the nation's history, Tim Markijohn was driving on Interstate 90 when Hamot Medical Center's power management system sent an alpha-numeric page to his beeper. That day, Aug. 14, 2003, a cascading failure of the power grid serving the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada left many towns and cities in the dark, and caused voltage in many facilities to swing wildly.

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When Valero's pipeline group wanted to be able to more accurately account for energy usage, they looked to Schneider Electric?s local Square D team for a solution, which revealed that the refinery was over-billing them to the tune of $200,000 a year!

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After continually losing money due to unexplainable electrical disturbances, a semiconductor plant in the northeastern US challenged the local utility company's claim of delivering 99.9% reliable power, capturing incriminating evidence from the plant?s new PowerLogic power monitoring system.

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Harmonics and capacitors do not mix very well, so this battery plant engineer needed a way of historically characterizing the harmonic levels and their sources. The PowerLogic historical charting function and steady state waveform capture allowed him to see when and where high levels were occurring (as high as 67% on Voltage).

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Thanks to a local community college?s PowerLogic system, a sudden electrical explosion at the nearby County Courthouse was captured in waveform and used as part of the documentation to collect a $4M claim.

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The San Francisco International Airport (SFIA) has applied its inclination toward advanced technology to its power management system, linking state-of-the-art power meters and circuit monitors with software to monitor its power system. The PowerLogic system from Schneider Electric provides early notification of power system trouble and vastly reduces the labor required to monitor tenant electrical usage and produce bills. The system allows the airport to pass along all aspects of the electrical rate, including time of use and multiple tier energy and demand rates. It also provides detailed power usage information that the airport can share with tenants. Click here to see January 2006 Energy & Power Management cover story

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Stephen Pauli is with Bayer Material Science in Baytown, Texas. This article first appeared in its original form at the 2003 IEEE/IAS Petroleum and Chemical Industry Technical Committee Conference. The IEEE Industrial Application Solutions published this paper in the Volume 11, Issue 2 in 2005 and granted permission for this posting. The paper is a guide to specifying, justifying, and installing substation monitoring and control systems based on Bayer's experience. Between 1996 and 1999, a large chemical firm made US$1 billion in capital investments, adding production capacity and doubling the site load to 220 MW. This growth strained the capacity of critical substations to carry loads had its companion transformer failed(in a typical main-tie-main arrangement). In parallel to a year 2000 cogeneration agreement, this firm funded a US$13 million project to improve the electrical distribution system infrastructure. This project installed a third 138-kV yard, a 138 kV/34.5 kV 2 × 64 MVA substation, and a satellite 2 × 34 MVA 13.8 kV substation.

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Like many universities, the University of Mississippi is always interested in maintaining its quality of education without increasing costs. The University wanted to increase funds available for educational programs without raising fees, so when it learned of a load curtailment initiative introduced by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) that would allow it to reduce its electricity costs, it was eager to participate.

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