Schneider Electric Manufacturing Today Think Turf Series Round Table was held in Hyderabad on November 29.
With the focus on digitise power, minimise downtime and increase productivity, Schneider Electric along with Manufacturing Today organised the first of the Think Turf Series in Hyderabad on November 29.
The panellists for the round table were Vaibhav Pokharna, sr. manager, energy management, Essar Steel; Anil Kumar Singh, work manager, Hyderabd & Gwalior, Akzo Nobel India; D Prince Arumairaj, sr. GM, operational & technical, Patil Rail Infrastructure; AK Malhotra, AVP & plant head, TCF, SRF; Harischandra Prasad K, VP, works, Cavendish; V Venkatanarayan, VP, site head, Dr Reddys Laboratories; D Kameswara Rao, GM, Sri Chakra Cement; K Sendhil Naathan, president, Tanfac Industries; and P Santosh Verma, head projects, Megha Engineering. Debasis Mohanty, director, technology consulting, Deloitte, moderated the discussion.
Mohanty asked panellists to speak about their digitisation efforts and the way they measure efficiency and their systems of reducing power consumption in their plants.
Naathan said his company burns sulphur to convert it into sulphur dioxide and much energy is emitted which is converted into steam. That steam is fed into turbo generators to generate 2.3MW power and 80% of power is drawn from this turbo generator. “We generate renewable ways of power generation. These are all the initiatives that have been taken,” he added.
Prasad said that the coal they use is converted into steam, which is used to run the turbines. “We have gone in for high GCB coal and a mixture of rice husk as well. Our plant a aero discharge plant.”
The panellists and attendees pose for a picture.
Rao said his company has been trying to conserve both, thermal and electrical energy, to reduce CO2 and now looking at ways to reduce CO2 further.
Talking about the steel industry, Pokharna said about 35-40% of production cost is energy. The company is looking at utilising by-product gases in the plant as much as possible.
With irrigation projects a power guzzler, Verma said that there are options to conserve energy. But here it’s difficult because one has to lift the water from one level to another and there are few options. But power consumption continues to remain high.
Arumairaj said his company consumes little power. “It is around 2-3% of energy that is required. We have introduced a stronger system for monitoring, but coal consumption is around 80-100 ton per day and we recycle.”
Few companies look at controlling each unit of energy, said Malhotra. They have appointed a team to do this and linked all energy consumption with its Oracle system of production.
Venkatanarayan said that he does not think that the government or the power sector gives them any advantage. “We make a sustainability report as per the global standards and have commitments at the corporate level about energy consumption. We do have grid power and we also have the energy exchange.”
Kumar of AkzoNobel said that is company has a good power management system. “For the last eight years. we are leading in sustainability index globally. Earlier, we had traditional systems which not only had an adverse impact on the environment. We started digital introductions to the plant on ways to preserve downtime and people have benefitted.”
Kiran Lagwankar, GM, Schneider Electric, spoke about the necessity of deploying power quality meters. “Momentary dips is what we as a sag event, which are unnoticed because normal meters will not be able to capture those events. Now we need to understand that there are several power quality issues that are going unnoticed. Schneider Electric has several solutions to help you in energy management and we have a demo here for you that will help you understand better,” he added.
The evening ended with cocktails and dinner and much networking.