FEV – India – Solar.

Onsite Solar Power Plant with Cloud based Energy Management System
at FEV India Pvt. Ltd., Pune, India

Need

Company Background: FEV is an internationally recognised leader in the design and development of powertrain, energy technology and electric vehicle driving systems. The company has its R&D facility at Pune, India.

With a focus on mapping and improving upon their carbon footprint, FEV chose to partner with BECIS to kickstart initiatives that would help FEV advance in their sustainability mission. Under this alliance BECIS has setup an onsite solar project, which helped reduce FEV’s dependency of procuring power from the utility. In addition, BECIS also installed its energy management hardware and software solution to track and help FEV take actions to improve their factory’s resource management. Both these initiatives tied well with their main objective to reduce carbon emissions by adopting power from green energy sources and to have a robust monitoring system to make sure the energy is utilised efficiently. The other objective was to join the ‘industry 4.0’ revolution by installing the EMS and making a digital twin of the factory and reducing manual dependency for data collection, storage, and analytics.

Challenges

Solar

  • Multiple roofs with combination of metal and RCC roofs having different orientations
  • High slope of roofs (which required implementation of zero-degree walkways)
  • Presence of skylights with risk of fall risk (HDG cover)

Manual Monitoring and Reporting

  • Manual data collection of utility information was time consuming, prone to errors and disallowed FEV to make quick resource requirement estimates
  • Absence of prompt alerts would delay preventive maintenance plans

 

Solution

To adopt green power source, a solar plant is installed across all rooftops of the facility. Solar panels are also placed on the North-facing side of the metal sheet roof. String inverters with multiple MPPTs have be installed to maximise green energy generation.

For managing the energy, we have installed a robust hardware and software system (EMS). With the help of the EMS we are monitoring the solar power generation and the overall power consumption in the premises. BECIS replaced 18 analogue energy meters (out of 25) with digital meters. The cloud based EMS is helping in:

  1. Tracking energy use from source to Load
  2. Reducing manual dependency on data collection and storage
  3. Having control over max demand and contract demand
  4. Providing alerts & notification in case of any faults occur across the load
  5. Providing energy data backup required for proper planning of production and maintenance activities
  6. Connecting legacy systems onto one platform
  7. Tracking progress of Implemented Measures
FEV India Onsite Solar
FEV India Onsite Solar
FEV Solar with Energy Management
FEV Energy Management System
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