Web-based monitoring cuts Carlsberg's energy usage by 10% 

London – Carlsberg UK has installed a web-based monitoring & targeting (M&T) system for its production and distribution operations, which employ around 1,800 staff across 16 sites.

Since implementing the system from eSight Energy, Carlsberg has reduced overall energy consumption by 10% and improved recovered energy from brewing process, which uses 60% of site usage. It has also reduced site water consumption by 10% and effluent costs by 16%.

The M&T system is designed to import and calculate weekly KPI data against targets for multiple utilities, including gas, water & electricity, as well as analyse production data and calculate plant efficiency.

Carlsberg is using the system to manage data imports from a wide range of meters to incorporate complex production procedures across the brewing process. Activities such as generation of compressed air and excessive water usage required can also be monitored and optimised.

The M&T system displays hourly dashboards at department-operator level to monitor energy usage when the plant is running, stopped, shutdown and during maintenance periods.

The dashboard module enables the user to bring together essential energy information, charts or tables on a single page. Users can run up to four easily interchangeable screens side-by-side, with each screen automatically updating every minute.

At Carlsberg, hourly dashboard modules, at department-operator level, track usage when the plant is running, stopped, shutdown or during maintenance periods.

An alarm module, meanwhile, generates range and average alarms, with alerts about high-usage in specific meters sent via email. This is linked to production to allow more responsive management of utilities costs, environmental compliance and production output.

The eSight system is managed by a Carlsberg onsite systems team: coordinated and facilitated to user departments by the energy centre manager and the water and effluent continuous improvement manager.

Carlsberg holds a weekly meeting with user departments to review eSight dashboards. The weekly KPI data is calculated in eSight and compared to targets, allowing changes to be made to enhance productivity and energy efficiency.

By tracking consumption loads, eSight has enabled Carlsberg to better utilise its CHP plant and recover heat by matching to process demands and so increase recovered energy from the brewing process.

The system is used as primary measure at the production level, focusing on software and plant improvements. As a result, Carlsberg UK have achieved continuous improvement towards root cause analysis.

“eSight has enabled us to visualise and measure our utility usage against production in a way which was not previously possible; the benefits of integrating eSight into our process have been invaluable,” said Paul Harris, site energy centre manager, Carlsberg UK.