Customer Success Story
Consumption at a Glance on One Platform
The challenge for Smurfit Westrock is to identify energy peaks in their plants, because the company uses every opportunity to operate more sustainably. That is why the paper-based packaging manufacturer was looking for a solution that would identify, monitor, and continuously analyze energy consumption in its plants, starting with those in France.
The solution was Power-Adapt. This energy monitoring system provides the global corporation a simple way of measuring and analyzing energy consumption in a wide range of machines and systems. The measurement results can be viewed and analyzed directly in the web-based user interface. In addition to energy, the easy- to-integrate system also measures temperature and humidity in the plants using additional sensors. The Power-Pulse pulse transmitter turns meters with pulse outputs into communicating meters. Smurfit Westrock connected meters for compressed air and other meters, such as for gas, water or steam, to the trans- mitter and can thus easily analyze consumption on the Power-Cloud platform.
The added value: After nearly nine months, energy efficiency had increased in 20 plants thanks to the Power-Adapt retrofit solution. This means 57% less electricity consumption outside of production hours. Seven additional French plants are to be equipped with Power-Adapt shortly.
Challenge
Safety is the top priority for the company and every employee, guiding the investments and management in all plants. Acting in a sustainable and environmentally conscious manner is also a top priority for Smurfit Kappa and Westrock, which merged to form Smurfit Westrock in the summer of 2024. That is why the company has been recycling the raw material of recovered paper for years. But that is by no means all that is being done to ensure sustainability.
Thinking about tomorrow ...
“Our ambition is to have at least net zero emissions by 2050 with a 55% reduction in fossil fuel emissions intensity by 2030,” says project manager Lionel Bernard, summarizing the global group‘s goals. He himself has to keep track of 39 French packaging plants. It is not only the enormously high energy costs that are causing Smurfit Westrock to make changes worldwide, but also the consciously practiced sustainability goals. “When our energy supplier sends us the bill for electricity consumption, the amounts are enormous. Of course, we have a rough idea of the areas where a particularly large amount of energy is needed, but not enough to be able to derive environmentally conscious and sustainable measures from it,” says the project manager.
How to identify energy guzzlers?
For the packaging expert, wasting energy is not an option. That‘s why a solution was needed to identify the energy sources that consume a lot of electricity. These include corrugator, printing machines, diecutting machines, compressors, waste systems, lighting and more.
Sustainable production also means saving water
To avoid wasting water and to treat water sustainably, the maintenance department regularly checks facilities for water leaks, carries out water efficiency analyses and reuses water multiple times. However, the company believes that this is still not enough. In order to optimize its energy and water management, Smurfit Westrock was looking for a solution that would advance its sustainability goals, and they wanted to implement this solution very quickly. Coincidentally, at this stage of deliberations, Eco Adapt, a French company that has been wholly owned by Schaeffler since March 2023, contacted Smurfit Westrock and presented its monitoring system. After several discussions with the current Schaeffler employee, Smurfit Westrock decided in favor of the Schaeffler solution.
To learn more about the customer, download the PDF of the Customer Success Story here.
Solution
1. The Rogowski coils or clamps measure the currents of the phases. The distance of the measuring unit can be up to 10 meters. The connection is made via cable.
2. The measuring unit Power-Elec measures the current via 6 x 3-phase circuits or 18 x 1-phase circuits up to max. 3,500 A. Communication is either via BACnet, Modbus or LoRaWAN.
3. The pulse transmitter Power-Pulse transforms flow meters with a pulse output into communicating meters. Examples include water, electricity, heat or gas.
4. More wireless sensors for temperature, humidity and CO₂ can be easily integrated.
5. The gateway records, processes and transmits energy data from various sources, and connects to the cloud- based platform via LTE. The gateway communicates via LoRaWAN and connects to other sensors (temperature, etc.), the pulse transmitter and the Power-Elec measuring unit.
6. The Power-Cloud records the consumption of the various devices and analyzes the efficiency of the processes and infrastructure.
7. The user interface provides transparency of consumption and quality data on different scales and enables energy efficiency analyses.
Further Insights
User-friendly visualization for more transparency
All the data can be displayed by the packaging manufacturer in different ways, one of which is shown above. The pie charts show the distribution of consumption by zone, use or aggregate.
The bar charts show the power consumption per day and the colors corresponds to the production areas.
The power consumption chart shows the comparison between the last 7 days and the 7 days before that. You can see here the trends between the two periods and the power consumption at the weekend.
What‘s the payoff?
With the insights, potential savings can be detected, measures defined and implemented. In addition, user- defined dashboards and alarms provide customized information that serves as a basis for analysis. Reports can be defined and easily sent by email. One highlight is the organizational chart display of the plant layout. Here, Smurfit Westrock can see the individual consumption in percent and kilowatt hours in relation to the total consumption at a glance. This makes benchmarking a child‘s play.
