Granular visibility: helping customers accelerate the journey to net zero

ABB Ability™ Energy and Asset Manager helps users optimize power consumption,  minimize downtime and reduce energy and maintenance costs by up to 30 percent. To a large extent, this is accomplished by segmenting, monitoring and data analysis down to individual pieces of equipment and subsystems, such as an elevator or a single HVAC system. The common denominator of this granular approach is that users are able to access a full picture of their connected assets’ health.

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_{Sherif El-Meshad Electrification Ratingen, Germany sherif.el-meshad@de.abb.com}

Energy plays a vital role in keeping every business running. Managing the cost, safety, and efficiency of that energy – including electricity and other power sources – is paramount to controlling operating expenses and reducing the risk of costly downtime or even catastrophic failure. The average cost of unplanned equipment downtime in manufacturing is $260,000 per hour [1], making energy and asset management a business imperative.

Government deadlines for reducing emissions are also drawing ever closer. To keep global warming to no more than 1.5°C – as called for in the Paris Agreement –emissions need to be reduced by 45 percent in the next seven years and reach net zero by 2050. 

However, at present, the average building wastes an estimated 30 percent [2] of the energy it consumes due to inefficiencies, resulting in unnecessary – yet easily avoidable – carbon emissions. 

As energy prices rise, infrastructure ages and government restrictions on carbon emissions proliferate, businesses are turning to digital solutions that will help them maintain uptime, get the most out of their assets, remain compliant, and accelerate their journey to carbon neutrality. ABB Ability™ Energy and Asset Manager, a modular, state-of-the-art cloud-based system providing intuitive dashboards →01, offers a solution.

With real-time visibility into energy consumption, electrical power quality, and the health of low- and medium-voltage electrical distribution system equipment, the solution helps organizations with multiple small or medium-size sites – such as factories, commercial buildings, and data centers – optimize power consumption and minimize downtime.

The digital solution’s modules can be purchased separately or together. Monitoring can also be segmented down to individual pieces of equipment and/or sub systems, such as an elevator, a single HVAC system, or a production line. This enables users to make informed decisions regarding when to reduce energy consumption, how to avoid unplanned downtime and how to use predictive maintenance to detect and proactively address issues before they escalate.

ABB Ability™ Energy Manager

ABB Ability™ Energy Manager adds value to users’ facilities and sites by supervising electrical systems and providing clear information about consumption that makes cutting waste and improving energy efficiency simple.

As every facility has different energy needs and targets, ABB Ability™ Energy Manager uses configurable widgets to meet the needs of each organization. Businesses can monitor their energy consumption across a select period and compare different groups’ energy consumption across multiple sites. They can also track specific performance trends by configuring the parameters, devices, operation and time period.

Reports are fully configurable to customers’ needs and can be received remotely via email. The system also offers automated alerts, allowing customers to receive immediate feedback on the status of their sites 24/7. Altogether, the features included in ABB Ability™ Energy Manager offer sustainability, operational and performance benefits.

One of the many advantages of this solution is that, for example, by identifying hidden energy drains and eliminating waste,  customers can achieve up to a 30 percent increase in efficiency. Facilities also benefit from lower energy bills and reductions in unplanned downtime. Furthermore, Energy Manager is easy to commission and install, and is scalable, from a single site to a multi-facility system.

ABB Ability™ Asset Manager 

In a similar way, ABB Ability™ Asset Manager provides analysis of device data across customers’ facilities that delivers granular visibility of the behavior of their electrical assets in real-time, in both low-voltage and medium-voltage environments. By monitoring asset condition, performance trends and alarm states, it enables condition-based and predictive maintenance that significantly reduces downtime and operational costs.

The system can also be tailored to each customer and site. The common denominator is that each user will be able to access a full picture of their connected assets’ health with clear categorizations for appropriate action, from “very poor” (mostly failed, urgent action required) to “very good” (running well, no action needed). This can be distilled into a wide range of reports, allowing businesses to gain a better understanding of how their assets are performing and identify key trends.

By implementing this system, customers can save up to 40 percent of maintenance costs and eliminate up to 30 percent of maintenance-related site intervention [3]. By digitizing electrical assets and optimizing maintenance cycles, they can also increase asset lifespan and reduce their environmental impact. In fact, 50 percent of electrical equipment such as metal cabinets, steel plates and busbars – products with high carbon footprints – can be used perpetually without being replaced if components such as circuit breakers are regularly monitored, maintained and upgraded.

The best news is that electrical infrastructure, including switchgear and other equipment, can be digitized rapidly with plug-and-play kits, allowing customers to connect to the cloud and use ABB Ability™ Asset Manager quickly. Like Energy Manager, the system can also be easily scaled to multiple sites. 

Scalable solutions

ABB Ability™ Energy and Asset Manager’s applications are designed to be an ever-growing ecosystem to which new solutions can be added. By using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), the system’s capabilities can be extended as rapidly as technology develops. A key example of this is ABB’s partnership with Viking Analytics, a Swedish startup that won ABB Electrification’s Startup Challenge in 2020. Here, ABB -Ability™ Asset Manager will be integrated with Viking Analytics’ advanced AI-powered analytics engine to automatically detect unseen or pre failure operational conditions for electrical equipment.

The AI engine operates in coordination with ABB Ability™ Asset Manager, adding advanced analytics that support businesses’ ability to predict and prevent faults in their electrical equipment in an even more granular way than before. This makes it easier for them to prevent costly failures, plan maintenance efficiently and maximize uptime.

On the ABB Ability™ Energy Manager side, one of ABB’s most successful integrations to date has been with Tallarna, a UK-based climate tech startup that has created an innovative approach to decarbonization projects for large property portfolios and energy infrastructures. Using AI-powered data analytics, customers can view the viability of energy optimization solutions alongside the availability of performance insurance and third-party finance on a single platform. 

The above examples illustrate that ABB’s quest for customer value is not limited to its in-house development capabilities but is based on a commitment to partnering with startups that can contribute to ABB’s offer by commercializing their innovations on the ABB Ability™ marketplace.

Constant evolution

As the energy landscape continues to evolve, so too will the solutions offered by ABB Ability™ Energy and Asset Manager, which are constantly being refined, not only via the integration of new applications, but also through ABB’s focus on enhancing back-end infrastructures. 

In terms of application development, ABB has exciting plans to introduce additional features, particularly regarding its asset management capabilities, such as end-to-end asset management solutions for a complete substation, encompassing medium-voltage, low-voltage and transformers – a frequent customer request. To address increasing demand in this area, ABB is working with OKTO GRID, a company specialized in transformer monitoring solutions. OKTO GRID’s unique sensor technology is non-invasive, where a monitoring device simply attaches magnetically to the transformer surface. Data is transmitted to the cloud almost instantaneously. This partnership allows ABB to offer a comprehensive transformer monitoring solution to the market.

In the realm of energy management, ABB is partnering with several startups to enrich its energy analysis and optimization features, thus enabling customers to conduct audits based on predefined standards.

The world of asset and energy management is evolving rapidly and those businesses that do not plan to digitize their physical infrastructure in the coming years will be finding it more and more challenging to keep up with competitors that instead choose to do so. ABB customers are in no danger of that. Not only will ABB continue to develop its digital solutions, but its strategic focus on partnering with innovative startups will ensure that ABB and its customers will always have access to cutting edge solutions capable of reaching new levels of operational and energy efficiency.

_References

_{[1] Solarwinds. Average cost of downtime per industry. Available: https://www.pingdom.com/outages/average-cost-of-downtime-per-industry/ [Accessed June 10, 2024].}

_{[2] EPA Energy Star. Available: https://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/publications/pubdocs/C+I_brochure.pdf [Accessed June 10, 2024].
[3] ABB. Data center case study. Available: https://search.abb.com/library/Download.aspx?DocumentID=9AKK107991A1983&LanguageCode=en&DocumentPartId=&Action-=Launch [Accessed June 10, 2024].
[4] ABB. ABB invests in artificial intelligence startup Viking Analytics. Available: https://new.abb.com/news/detail/99193/abb-invests-in-artificial-intelligence-startup-viking-analytics [Accessed June 10, 2024].
[5] ABB. ABB invests in climate tech startup Tallarna. Available: https://new.abb.com/news/detail/97259/abb-invests-in-climate-tech-start-up-tallarna [Accessed June 10, 2024].
[6] ABB. ABB invests in OKTO GRID. Available: https://new.abb.com/news/detail/98887/abb-invests-in-okto-grid-to-digitalize-the-energy-grid-and-extend-life-of-key-components} [Accessed June 10, 2024]

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