When Mike Krone considered a Square D® PowerLogic® power management system, he did so based on more beneficial features and fewer hidden costs. Once the system was installed he discovered unexpected added value that has already saved the University of Maryland, Baltimore $100,000 and will likely save much more.

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When a metal manufacturing plant in the northeast was forced to consider a substation upgrade totaling nearly $1 million, information from their PowerLogic system convinced the company to simply switch loads to three other existing substations with sufficient capacity, turning a major capital expense into a very minor project.

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Just like every other industrial enterprise, the Hershey Company's candy manufacturing plant in Stuarts Draft, VA, needs electrical power. Unlike many other enterprises, plant management has taken a proactive approach to its power usage. In the late 1990s, due to a plant expansion, Hershey's corporate engineering arm decided to bring on a power monitoring and control system. Since then, the benefits of that decision,utilizing Square D Powerlogic products from Schneider Electric, have gone far beyond analysis of power usage and quality and a better understanding of how the electrical distribution system is functioning at any given time.

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Many of the nation's larger campuses in operation today include their own water treatment plants and power plants. Supplying power to these campuses has become a huge endeavor. 

To meet demand at Kent State, the university recently built a new power plant and is updating its distribution systems on campus. Part of bringing the new Power Plant online, was updating the distribution system from a 5KV system to a 15KV system. 

The man charged with overseeing the campus' power is Tom Dunn, the Associate Director of Energy. He's been with Kent State for over 28 years. "By choice, we maintain a minimum import from the utility," says Dunn. "In the summer, it increases a little and we produce 80-85 percent of our own power and import 20 percent " but for the most part we're pretty self-sufficient." Even before the new Power Plant, a more robust power distribution system needed to be in place, and the need for an improved power monitoring system was identified.

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Market growth and frequent product innovations were forcing the facility personnel at Smith and Nephew's Memphis plant to struggle to keep up with the demand for changes in the manufacturing processes. Without a good monitoring system to provide an accurate picture of loading, electricians struggled to determine if particular circuits could handle new loads. After installing a PowerLogic system, the staff soon had accurate peak demand data that allowed them to add new loads to existing circuits and avoid a $2 million expansion.

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A global supplier of computing and imaging solutions, facing forced utility cutbacks needed a means to quickly shed non-essential electrical loads to avoid a total shutdown. By implementing a system that could shed 15% of the total connected electrical load, within 15 minutes after receiving a call from their local utility, forced outages could be avoided and thus preserve critical power needs.

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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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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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