2008-01-23 - The vast majority of the world’s industrial motors are unnecessarily over-sized. ABB motor control technology can help reduce the vast amounts of costly energy needlessly wasted, as well as excessive greenhouse gas emissions.
By
ABB Communications
Motors account for 65 percent of the world’s industrial energy consumption. Most of those motors are grossly over-dimensioned, consuming far more energy and emitting more pollutants than is necessary.
Intelligent motor control systems let ABB customers downsize motors for significant energy savings.
“It’s common practice for industrial users to buy a motor that far exceeds their needs,” says Kjell Andersson of ABB Low Voltage Systems, Sweden. “They do this to give the motor a protective buffer from power spikes and uncontrolled overload.”
But over-dimensioned protective buffers cost money and harm the environment.
By using ABB's MNS Motor Management INSUM or the recently launched MNSiS, customers can install smaller, energy-efficient motors that are correctly dimensioned, consume less energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
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MNS Motor Management INSUM combines motor control, monitoring and protection into one microprocessor-based system with a direct communication line to higher-level control systems. The ability to collect, filter and distribute relevant and complete electrical system data makes this a benchmark system for plant control, and optimizes the management, use and interaction of electrical system and process assets.
MNS systems make it possible to drop down in size from, say, an excessively dimensioned 37 kW motor to a smaller 30 kW motor.
For a typical medium-sized site with 200 motors, that equates to a total saving of about 180,000 kilowatt hours a year and reduced annual CO2 emissions of 90 tons. For a paper mill with 1,500 motors, the savings are even more striking.
Swedish minerals company LKAB is a case in point.
Power play
One of the world’s leading suppliers of iron ore products, LKAB consumes a 1.7 terawatt hours of electric power a year, 90 percent of which is used to power some 15,000 motors.
Several years ago LKAB was concerned to find that only 16 percent of its motors were correctly dimensioned.
Since then it has been gradually replacing its oversized motors with correctly dimensioned, energy-efficient ABB motors and equipping its low voltage switchgear with INSUM.
INSUM and MNSiS are low voltage power distribution and motor control centers that protect, control and monitor motors, individually and plant-wide.
Developed as part of ABB’s MNS intelligent low voltage switchgear offering, they enable operators to manage the status, condition and energy consumption of a plant’s motors.
INSUM is used widely in process industries around the world and by industry giants like BASF, BP, Shell and Valmet. MNSiS (iS stands for integrated solution) was launched worldwide in 2006 to widespread industry acclaim.