The energy consumption in a company such as BUTTING is enormous. The in-house medium voltage network today includes more than 40 transformers in order to distribute the required energy to the individual production areas or individual large consumers. Typical energy guzzlers include annealing systems which require very high performance during production and thus have relatively constant energy consumption throughout the day. It is different with presses, for example, which only require peak loads during the short pressing process, and thus sometimes have very fluctuating energy consumption.
The aim of Energy Management is to improve energy efficiency within the company in a sustainable way. This is intended to reduce energy costs, ensure competitiveness and save resources. The basis for this is calculating potential energy savings. This is successful at the highest level through digital electricity meters at every transformer station, which can assign energy consumption figures to their original sources. Since 2015, BUTTING has been able to localise energy consumption on the plant premises by monitoring all the transformer stations. It is planned to introduce further measuring points in order to be able to assign energy consumption to even smaller areas or units.
This localisation of consumption will enable potential energy saving measures to be calculated and applied, thus also reducing energy costs. This is currently being implemented in particular by re-equipping lighting arrangements in the workshops and going over to LED lighting. Due to the constant increases in energy costs, it will be more and more important in the future to have detailed knowledge of the energy flow within the company and the energy consumption of individual consumers.
In this field, BUTTING is a pioneer and is constantly working to optimise the processes. Stefan Dammann, the Energy Management Officer at BUTTING, makes this clear: “We are confident that in the course of this year we will increase the number of areas where consumption can be localised, and thus be able to discover more potential energy savings.”
BUTTING – Progress by Tradition