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Data is everything, and with the right data you can truly optimize your process controls. That’s what Foreseer delivers-the system information you need to vastly enhance energy efficiency.
With a capacity of 113.6 million litres per day, the City of Thunder Bay’s Bare Point Water Treatment Plant serves over 102,000 residents through 11 remote locations. To meet its municipal mandates, the Plant was looking for ways to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, lower its energy consumption to control operational costs, and improve the performance of its systems and equipment. However, to reach these goals, the Plant needed the ability to analyze its energy usage at both the primary treatment facility and across the remote sites-which also include four storm water sites. While the Plant had Eaton Power Xpert Meters installed (PXM 6000 and PXM 8000), only one of the remote stations had an additional communicating meter. This meant the City could obtain readings from the Plant and each station individually, but did not have an integrated view of its energy usage across locations. To close this gap, the City decided to upgrade its remaining 14 remote stations to Eaton PXM 2000 Series communicating meters.
Several years ago, the City of Thunder Bay set a strategic objective to integrate climate adaptation into its plans, policies, procedures, projects, and investment decisions. The City’s Bare Point Water Treatment Plant responded with a range of initiatives-including the adoption of LED lighting and the installation of intelligent energy controls. However, without the capacity to accurately measure output at each station, it could not calculate its actual project savings or track power quality. The Plant wanted a way to link data for each station’s energy output with its central SCADA system to monitor, manage, analyze, and trend its energy availability, loading, and consumption in real-time. The goal was to reduce energy costs, improve process control, and reduce reactive maintenance, which could ultimately translate into lower utility rates for City residents.
Leveraging its longstanding relationship with Eaton, the Plant installed Eaton’s Foreseer® software, an electrical power monitoring system (EPMS) capable of connecting an operation’s vast array of devices and sensors, regardless of the manufacturer or model. By facilitating real-time power and environmental system monitoring, Foreseer helps organizations reduce power consumption costs and avoid unplanned downtime due to system failure.
The system was optimal for the Plant for several reasons. First, it provides a dashboard to its entire power system, letting the Plant monitor power usage across sites on a 24/7 basis. Second, if components are out of balance, the system can be configured to send an alert via email, enabling rapid investigation and remediation. Third, Foreseer monitors power usage across systems and builds a profile over time, enabling it to send alerts based on pre-set parameters. This means the Plant gets access to predictive intelligence to respond pro-actively, before it experiences service failures.
Beyond this built-in functionality, the City of Thunder Bay plans on exporting data from Eaton Power Xpert Meters into its SCADA system. As Larry Holm, Superintendent of the City of Thunder Bay’s Water Treatment Plants explains, “This will allow process optimization through real-time load monitoring. Once the SCADA and Eaton Power Xpert Meters are sharing real-time data, we can correlate things like how changing distribution system pressures effects energy usage and consumption. This will let us operate at the optimal pressure settings and create opportunities for better energy usage. Real-time data can also be used to analyze equipment efficiency to reduce reactive maintenance and improve process control.”
The Bare Point Water Treatment Plant anticipates a range of future benefits, and is already realizing measurable results. Potentially its greatest success came when the team was reviewing its Power Xpert Meters waveform data and noticed harmonic levels at the Plant were higher than expected. “At the time, we didn’t have a method to calculate an acceptable threshold level for our harmonics,” Holm notes. “So we used data from our Arc flash study to find our available fault current at the Plant’s main incoming breaker. By using this value and our demand load, we were able to approximate an acceptable harmonic level-only to discover the harmonic levels were quite high. Since the variable frequency drives are our largest possible sources of harmonics, we had a service contractor open up three harmonic filters, to discover some had blown fuses and some had failed.” After purchasing kits to repair the filters, the Plant saw an immediate improvement in harmonic levels and decided to share its good fortune with neighbouring industrial facilities.
“Our contractor went out to other water plants in surrounding communities and found similar failures at those sites, which have now been repaired. It’s a real success story. Without the data collected by the Eaton software, we never would have found this issue until failures started to occur. The success was making improvements not only within our own facility but in other facilities across Northern Ontario as well.” While Holm says that the Plant likely recovered its entire investment by resolving this harmonic issue alone, its savings didn’t stop there. In fact, a few months after connecting its uninterruptable power supply (UPS), the Plant received an alarm from the Power Xpert Meter only to find the temperature in its UPS room was high, causing swelling of some batteries. After replacing the failed batteries and setting the UPS to charge at a lower rate, the Plant installed a new temperature sensor that alarms at its SCADA to prevent future occurrences. Because the issue was resolved so quickly, the Plant suffered no lost production due to UPS downtime.
At another remote pumping station, the system detected a substantial voltage phase imbalance. The station was running a three-phase, 600 volt system, it was expected its voltage levels to be equally distributed across all three phases. The Eaton software, however, showed that the voltage levels were unequally distributed. By reconfiguring how some single phase loads were connected on the system, the Plant was able to correct the imbalance. Holm explains, “Before we installed this software, whenever we experienced power quality issues at the Bare Point Water Treatment Plant, it took an exceptional amount of time and labour to pinpoint the cause. Now, our meters are connected to the software and are collecting real-time data. This is critical because electrical disturbances can happen over a few milliseconds and when they do, we can now track how they propagate through the plant. Having the meters synchronized using network time protocol (NTP) ensures the meters, internal clocks are synchronized. This lets us identify the root cause of a problem much faster than we could have in the past.”
These and related results have driven Holm to encourage the expansion of electrical monitoring systems across the City of Thunder Bay. “If we can’t measure our energy usage, we can’t manage or monitor it,” Holm stresses. “The Foreseer software helps resolve that challenge by providing us with a 24/7 predictive diagnostic tool. Eaton is a great company that supports their products and services from the initial design phase through implementation. Their system is also expandable, which means other areas of the City can realize similar energy savings by installing Power Xpert Meters too.
