1.0 KBC’s Sustainability Statement
Everyone has a role to play in delivering a better future for the next generation; in what we do ourselves and what we expect of others either as individual contributors, leading teams or leading organizations.
Leading companies should be pursuing triple bottom line performance, placing the same amount of importance on people and environment as profits. Yokogawa has 2050 goals of achieving net-zero emissions, well-being of all and circular economy and is working towards sustainability targets linked to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, Yokogawa’s vision is making the world a better place through our digitalization technologies, practices and people.
Achieving superior results, sustained, requires actions done with excellence. Being part of something can’t be passive. This is because excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives. Because choice, not chance, determines your destiny.
Therefore, our pledge is to measure and improve in these areas:
• Our resource efficiency
• Our carbon emissions
• The well-being of our people
Through this we believe we will enhance the lives of those around us and the environment we pass on.
Energy Management and Optimization is one important part to measure and improve in this triple bottom sustainment path:
A better energy management can also make the difference in the company Profit and Loss (P&L), and it has been proven as an effective work process to capture additional savings.
On top of the traditional focus on reliability, the addition of an energy monitoring and optimization culture to the operations is helping the process industry to improve company margins.
Yokogawa has been helping the process industry, mainly hydrocarbon sector, for almost 35 years to reduce energy costs and make sites more energy efficient by taking special care in managing the energy culture change among operators and engineers and ensuring ownership of the energy management and optimization systems.
Introducing this cultural step change requires a reliable and robust tool which can be accepted by operations and a partner to help to sustain the value over time. Yokogawa has proven this with more than 100 systems successfully implemented worldwide.
Yokogawa/KBC background and experience and technology make it ready to contribute, support and assist our customer and the market in addressing renewable energy now and during the energy transition.
2.0 Introduction – KBC and Renewables
Because of tighter environmental regulations, reduced margins and significant advances of the technologies related to renewable energy resources, civil and industrial complexes are becoming very interested in making a good use of them by integrating within or reformulating their existing energy systems.
Refining, petrochemical and industrial companies around the world are targeting to reduce its carbon footprint with the help of the renewables, starting what can be considered an energy transition path.
The inclusion of renewables to the energy sources pool in the industrial environment has a great potential to reduce costs as well as Green House Emissions (GHG). Especially, if it is well integrated with the available conventional sources.
However, the level of integration that could be achieved implies an increasing complexity in the management of these mixed energy systems.
Decisions, at operational level, on when to use the co-generators based on fossil fuel sources, which traditionally were only based on expected power and fuel prices, will now be directly influenced by the predictions of renewables availability, which in turn depends on weather conditions such as wind speed or solar intensity.
Moreover, due to the uncertainty of the factors that affects the generation of renewable energy (e.g., solar and wind intensities), power storage facilities need to be explicitly considered.
For example, by using batteries or by electrolyzing water for green hydrogen generation, which, in turn could be used in the processes at an industrial site (e.g., refinery hydrotreating units), to produce liquids or synthetic fuel, stored to be burned later in fuel cells, injected in the Natural Gas network, fuel network, stored in caverns, etc.
All this leads to a great challenge for the person or team responsible for the optimal management and operation of the more and more complex energy systems.
KBC is strongly committed and fully prepared to help and escort our customers providing value, as we are doing right now, and through their energy transitions.
With the objective to support this complex set of decisions, KBC believes that the decision support tools to be used should account for the following:
- Integrated, holistic models, that considers not only pieces of equipment or subsystems often encountered in conventional energy systems (fuel, steam, electricity) but also what is related to renewable energy sources (PV, wind, biomass, H2).
- Support for forecasting, which estimates future operational conditions of the site and its environment (weather, power/fuels market conditions, energy demand, etc.).
- Allow for the analysis of the current and past energy efficiency and performance of the site and renewable sources (monitoring).
- Support for the optimal energy schedule calculation, taking into consideration expected availability, consumption, variability in electricity prices and inventory as well as multi-period related decisions.
- Automated optimal schedule and real time recommendations generation to relieve schedulers and operators from complex and time-consuming decision-making activities.
- Targeting autonomous operation in the short and medium term.
Real time optimization and scheduling, working together and properly aligned, will be the way to constantly produce and distribute the energy at the minimum cost, while continually reducing GHG emissions.
The inherent variability of the renewables and electricity market prices, and the need to coordinate with both, energy storage and conventional production backup makes optimal energy scheduling a key and pivotal need.
Because of this strong KBC commitment to help to start right now and smoothly progress during the energy transition, we propose a set of software tools and consulting expertise, described hereafter.
The use of KBC’s Visual MESA Energy Management System applications for this purpose, under the current energy and expected transition scenarios, will be described.
3.0 Visual MESA and the Renewable Energy Systems
KBC’s Visual MESATM Energy Management System is an integrated monitoring, optimal scheduling and real-time optimization technology suite for energy systems. It delivers better and faster operational decisions, and actionable insights for planning, scheduling and trading of energy. Real-time actions can be taken, either in open loop (i.e., in advisory mode) or closed loop (i.e., acting directly on the control system set-points), aligned with the optimal schedule.
VM EMS is based on a real time, model based, digital twin of the energy system approach. That is, a single model that can be used to address energy system activities of the past, present and future: real time monitor, optimization and optimal multi-period schedule to operate always at the lowest economic cost and within emission constraints.
In Figure 2, the VM EMS overall functionality is presented.
The VM EMS applications scope and main functionalities are briefly described in the following table:
VM EMS provides an environment to model holistically and in an integrated way the different energy subsystems that are relevant to the site or area (steam, electricity, fuels) along with the corresponding pieces of equipment (gas turbines, boilers, etc.) including the renewable energy subsystem.
In particular, KBC’s Visual MESA Multi-period Optimizer (VM-MPO) application is a management tool for the optimal energy sistems scheduling and is part of the KBC’s VM EMS suite.
In stand-alone use, VM-MPO can be used by Operators and Engineers to generate, analyze and/or distribute the optimal schedule of the utilities system of a given site or power plant. VM-MPO can be even configured to work automatically, gathering and processing the necessary forecasts of the unmodelled variables, executing the calculations and distributing the resulting reports.
In service mode, VM-MPO can be configured to work autonomously by:
• gathering and processing the necessary forecasts of the needed variables,
• automatically executing the optimal schedule calculations,
• distributing the resulting reports and
• managing the real time optimization constraints and handles to be aligned with the optimal schedule
Being directly connected to the Visual MESA Energy Real Time Optimizer (VM-ERTO, open loop, adsvisory mode) or to the Visual MESA Energy Closed Loop Real Time Optimizer (VM-ECLRTO, closed-loop) in case the targets that are generated from the schedule need to be automatically passed to the optimizers. This guarantees consistency between the decisions systems at different time scales (i.e. optimizing in real time but accounting for the constraints imposed by the optimal schedule).
At KBC we believe that the VM-MPO, working aligned with rest of the applications of the VM EMS suite, will became to be a pivotal application to support optimal decisions to be taken when renewable energy sources are to be managed.
VM-MPO provides a set of tools to obtain and generate predictions to those variables that are not measured or modeled (e.g. electricity prices, weather conditions, etc.) but impact directly the optimal operating decisions. This is important in this context, since typically the renewable energy systems depend directly on the weather conditions (wind speed, solar intensity, etc.). Being able to predict these variables as well as market conditions is very important when seeking the optimal schedule of the site.
VM-MPO has been specially designed to account for those restrictions that affect multiple time periods (usually in the future). This makes it ideal to take decisions where energy inventories, time-sensitive operating constraints (e.g. minimum down time or up time for pieces of equipment, allowed sequencing) or the start/stop schedule of complex equipment (e.g. gas turbines with their related heat recovery steam generation and steam turbo generator) are present.
VM-MPO can be used in different types of renewable energy systems. A few examples showing some of the potential uses are:
Concentrated Solar Power: VM-MPO can be used to manage the energy storage and the start/stop of the system (pumping of the heating fluid, steam turbines) as a function of the solar intensity and other specific constraints.
Photovoltaic (PV) Solar Energy: VM-MPO can be used to manage the energy storage as a function of the prediction of the solar intensity and other specific restrictions and constraints.
Wind Power: VM-MPO can be used to manage the inventory of hydrogen when it is produced as a way to storage energy or further processed to achieve other products as a function of the prediction of the wind speed and other restrictions.VM-MPO could eventually be used to define the start/stop of the turbines.
Biomass: VM-MPO can be used to manage the biomass inventory that is used for the generation of steam or electricity as a function of the forecasted supply as well as constraints on the storage capacity and alternative fuel costs.
The following diagram shows how the VM-MPO considers the different areas that need to be accounted for the energy management system, considering all the pieces under a “Virtual Power Plant” concept. In particular, the diagram is referred to the renewable energy subsystem.
Notes:
- The solar intensity forecasted for the next hours can be obtained via the weather services. VM-MPO provides RESTful interfaces that can be easily configured to access such services.
- Wind intensity and direction, as well as pressure and temperature forecasts for the next hours can be similarly obtained via the weather service as in the case of the solar intensity.
- VM-MPO can provide the optimal hydrogen inventory management as a function of market conditions and site demands as well as other constraints.
- VM-MPO can provide the management of the electric energy stored in the batteries as a function of the market conditions, demand of the site as well as other constraints.
- An electrolysis model with the appropriate correlation, even simplified, could be used in VM-MPO for the green hydrogen production, in order to take proper decisions.
- VM-MPO can provide all necessary functionalities to tackle the modeling, optimization and generation of reports for the optimal schedule of the utilities system of the site.
4.0 Future Developments
Even though KBC’s VM EMS energy management framework provides right now an appropriate environment to handle the interaction between a wide variety of energy sources, it can be further improved by adding more details on the pieces of equipment related to renewable energy or any special customer sub-system. This will allow for a more accurate decision-making support at a lower level. Moreover, a fine tune of non-traditional energy sources logistic constraints may be necessary.
We can mention a few future developments that could be included in the VM EMS for the better support of renewable energy systems and hydrogen in conjunction with the traditional, hydrocarbon based systems:
- Development of models that capture more details on the pieces of equipment related to renewable energy for use in real time and within a scheduling/planning framework for VM EMS. (e.g. wind turbines, photoelectric cells, batteries, fuel cells, biomass, etc.).
- Improvement in the modeling of the hydrogen network. Particularly, integrating the different types (green, grey, blue) within the fuel network or Virtual Power Plant scope and accounting for the emissions, particularly CO2.
- Addition of some process side equipment directly related to renewable energy (e.g. green hydrogen production process, synthetic fuel from hydrogen production process, etc.).