SIMATIC powerrate – Proactive energy management

Power supply limits which are contractually agreed with power providers are an instrument for limiting energy costs. Power providers generally offer reduced rates for constant, calculable power values. Plant operators unable to adhere to their agreed power limits face significantly higher procurement prices, surcharges or even penalties.

The load management feature of SIMATIC powerrate carries out cyclic trend calculations in order to issue warnings and alarms if violation of the limit is likely and to switch off loads in accordance with the given configuration if required. This enables plant operators to avoid penalty payments and lower their energy costs.

To prevent unnecessary switching operations, numerous parameters are available for adapting the load management to the current process conditions – and all this can be done easily and conveniently via faceplates. For loads that are distributed over different PLCs, SIMATIC powerrate contains appropriate PLC-to-PLC communication blocks which can be used to integrate these loads into the load management system.

SIMATIC powerrate also norms, visualizes and archives the average energy consumption and power values: On a plant-wide level, SIMATIC powerrate for the SIMATIC WinCC process visualization system delivers an impressive performance. The software records all energy-related consumption data of the plant, correlates them to the specific electrical loads, visualizes them clearly, and saves them in the archive.