Send your machine on Christmas vacation
Demand-based energy management at thyssenkrupp Dynamic Components
Production facilities are the biggest consumers of electricity at Automotive Technology. All fifty production sites worldwide consume around 500 gigawatt hours of electricity per year. This is enough to supply around 180,000 households in Germany with electricity all year round.
Sustainable energy management is therefore of great importance for all Automotive Technology sites. "In an ideal world, we would supply electricity to the second only to the equipment that is actually needed in production. All machines that draw power but don't produce are basically superfluous consumers," explains Uli Beyer, energy manager at thyssenkrupp Dynamic Components in Ilsenburg. Demand-based energy control is particularly important when it is foreseeable that production will not run at full capacity for a longer period.
"Particularly now before the Christmas break, when production traditionally shuts down, we can save consumption, costs and emissions through good energy management. However, because many employees are unsure whether they can actually shut down their machine, they simply leave it running when in doubt," Beyer continues.
Standby concepts offer a solution to this dilemma. These concepts were developed for all locations at Dynamic Components by the experts from energy management and production planning.
"These plans specify very precisely which systems may be specifically taken off the grid or put into energy-saving mode during production breaks. This gives colleagues the necessary security to adjust power consumption in their respective shifts according to the actual workload," reports Beyer. Thanks to feedback from employees, these standby concepts are also constantly being refined and improved.
"We already differentiate down to the hour and selectively take systems off the grid, depending on whether the breaks last four hours, eight hours or the entire weekend. This is not only advantageous over the Christmas period, but has also saved us a lot of energy over the last few months, when production over long stretches was very volatile due to corona," says a pleased Beyer.