Tutorial 1: Wednesday Morning

Business Opportunities created by Novel Energy Performance Indicator (EnPI): The Benchmark-Energy-Factor Concept

  • Constantin Pitis Dr. Constantin Pitis, P.Eng.,
    Powertech Labs Inc.

Tutorials are eligible Continuing Education Units (CEU) and Professional Development Units (PDUs)! CEUs can be registered with the Engineering Institute of Canada. Tutorial 1 counts for 0.23 CEUs.

Energy Performance Indicators (EnPIs) are used for benchmarking industrial and commercial systems and processes. Traditionally EnPI’s are defined as ratio of energy used per product unit, volume (kWh/t, kWh/ft3) or other physical quantity related to production, or just energy density (kWh/m2, kWh/MMBtu). The drawbacks of such EnPIs types are:

  • Mistakenly incorporates non-productive energy
  • Absence of a large population of comparable data compounded with complexity of the systems and processes
  • Yield high uncertainties on intercepts when a regression analysis is used
  • Reluctance of enterprises to share data on processes that are often considered proprietary
  • Ethical and legal issues
  • Large variability and uncontrolled trends of the REFERENCE (sometime using Best Practices) requiring tedious Benchmarking process

The presentation deals with basics of a new concept – the unitless Benchmark-Energy-Factor (BEF) that overcomes all the above drawbacks by setting reliable REFERENCES based on well-known and common physical laws, as proposed by ISO 50001 and ISO 50006. The BEF concept splits the used energy in Essential (or Ideal) Energy, EEss (as reference) and Energy at Risk (E@R) that is waste energy. The concept sets reliable REFERENCES obtained by using well-known physical laws being defined as:

Tutorial 1 - Figure 1

The BEF concept was tested on industrial systems under a pilot project conducted by BC Hydro and Canadian Standards Association (CSA), when major features of the new concept have been studied and defined. The case studies’ outcomes indicated that BEF Concept offers multiple business opportunities for Enterprises and innovative energy efficiency solutions for DSM programs starting from mathematical models and process instrumentation to process diagnose based on DOL measurements of electrical and mechanical quantities.

As a result, Canadian Utilities and NRCan started a new set of Customer Orientated standards that are based on the new concept: Refrigeration systems – C500, Data Centers – C510, Mining slurry pumps – C502.

The research received “Best Paper Award” at IEEE – International Conference on Systems – SysCon 2015.

Tutorial 1 - Figure 2

Presentation will highlight business opportunities for academia, consultants, engineers, vendors and last but not least – customers, related to various phases of the existent and future projects on systems and processes:

  • Generating Mathematical Models for EEss, spread sheets, know-how documentation
  • Elaborate Process instrumentation, Testing procedure, Data acquisition systems
  • Site testing, Validation, Accuracy and Sensitivity tests
  • Benchmarking activity reporting conservation potential, demand and energy savings to interested parts (customer, utility, government)
  • Creating Standard Seed documents
  • Setting BEF ranges and targets and reporting to utility and Ministry of Energy
  • Training various segments of audience in using the concept tool
  • Implementation at customer level by using of Governmental and Utility incentive programs
  • Direct-on-Line reporting, reporting power demand and energy savings at corporation level and/or to utility
  • Elaborate System/Process diagnose methodology and predictive maintenance at customer level
  • Concept tool maintenance activity