Second only to crude oil, electrical power is typically one of the highest production costs and key elements in the refining business. In the extremely competitive petrochemical industry, products are produced 24 hours/day - 7 days/week and pumped directly into the market without an inventory buffer. Unscheduled interruptions or disturbances which affect process equipment can lead to millions of dollars in lost production and electrical equipment if not managed properly. Therefore, the continuous supply of high quality power is essential to survival in the refining industry. This paper describes one west coast Refinery's success in proactively managing 110MW of power consumption with their PowerLogic power monitoring and control system that paid for itself in less than one year after it was fully commissioned.

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The idea of "critical power" has no more important application than in the healthcare industry. With sensitive equipment that demands extreme levels of power quality to operate correctly, even a momentary lapse in power quality - or even worse - a power system failure, can result in a tragic event. Patients take for granted that when you check into a hospital, the lights won't suddenly turn off just as the surgeon is preparing to perform a delicate maneuver. Keeping power issues under wraps is no small task even at a small medical center, but it's especially demanding when you're one of the nation's largest healthcare facilities. Beaumont Hospital started in 1955 as a single 238-bed hospital suited to serve a small community in Royal Oak, Mich., and has grown into a two-hospital regional medical center, with outpatient locations throughout metro Detroit. In fact, the Royal Oak hospital is now a 1,061-bed tertiary care, teaching, research and referral hospital that is now the largest inpatient hospital in the country for inpatient volume and second for surgeries performed. Its medical staff includes more than 2,400 physicians representing more than 91 medical and surgical specialties. The Royal Oak facility is not only large in volume, scope and scale, but a heavyweight in terms of influence and reputation. It?s a regular industry award winner, and is repeatedly named on best hospital lists, such as the annual U.S. News & World Report Best Hospitals list. And Beaumont Hospital continues to grow and rapidly expand its campus. But with this growth comes more demanding energy and power requirements and a significant staff to keep it running. In 1997, Beaumont brought in Optim, a company specializing in providing consulting and management services exclusively to hospitals and the healthcare industry for construction, technology and facilities programs, to provide energy efficient buildings and systems for the hospital.

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Limited access to natural resources, such as water and oil, challenge the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan to provide its five million residents with a secure source of reliable and affordable energy. The country is building a national energy-information infrastructure to monitor energy transactions and billing between the newly independent power generation, transmission, and distribution companies. Each separate company must accurately monitor and communicate to all market participants everything from the quantity and quality of power produced and delivered, to up-to-the-minute billing and time-of-use data. An energy and power monitoring system from Power Measurement (now part of Schneider Electric) using a network of 150 intelligent, GPS time-synchronized meters linked to four software servers, tracks and verifies all energy transactions. A parallel metering network confirms consistency and accuracy of all data and parallel servers, equipped with identical energy management and billing software, sit at each company's headquarters to receive information from all metering points. This reliable, synchronized, countrywide enterprise energy management system has set the stage for a competitive, financially viable environment for the production and sale of electricity.

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Rio Grande Electric Cooperative (RGEC) in Brackettville, Texas, provides electric service to over 10,000 metering points across Texas and New Mexico. Traditionally, the company's commitment to providing a reliable source of power across 27,000-square-miles of barren terrain has presented some interesting challenges; just to check and service remote substations, maintenance crews routinely faced driving times of up to seven hours each way. So when RGEC's Technical Services department considered upgrades to the co-op's electrical metering equipment, the question of communications was paramount. Here was an opportunity to monitor the status of the entire distribution network, while reducing the amount of time technicians must spend on the road - but how could they communicate with remote substations where telephone coverage was sparse, and cellular networks practically nonexistent? As part of a planned upgrade to a full PowerLogic® ION® system from Square D®/Schneider Electric, RGEC identified satellite communications as the answer. Combining reasonable costs with unlimited flexibility, satellite stood out as the most cost-effective way to support reliable communications between the energy-management software installed at the headquarters, and the network of intelligent energy meters destined for the remote substations.

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