Consume power at the right time with EMS

An Energy Management System (usually abbreviated to EMS) allows you to gain insight into the energy consumption and needs of your storage system, as well as into the available energy supply and the associated price. EMS is very popular in the industrial world and now also in storage technology equipment. More and more providers of industrial mechanization are implementing EMS in software for computer programs that control equipment. So is Omnivent.

Control energy with EMS module

“We recently developed and released the OmniCuro V5 with EMS for this purpose”, sales manager Cor van Maanen shows at a computer screen. “I’ll give an example of how that works. A time when a lot of energy is needed for potato storage, for example, is during the drying and cooling period, so at the start of the storage season. In practice, you often see that at favorable drying or cooling moments all fans are running at the same time.” Van Maanen then takes out his smartphone. “Look, here I have a graph of the electricity price at different times of the day. The date is recent, you see, November 17, 2022.

Run equipment when the energy price is favorable

You can see prices are low between midnight and 7 am, sometimes almost 0 euro. This is very interesting with high energy costs these days. The price peaks between 7 and 10 a.m. and between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. If you can stay away from those peaks, you will already save a lot of euros. You can also see in this graph that the prices, in this case of the energy grid company, are still relatively high during the day. However, for those with solar panels or wind turbine power at their disposal, the prices are low during the day, and they could also run their storage devices at that time.

In practice, fans will run more evenly throughout the day, as much as possible in periods with the lowest electricity price.

It is of course important the program continues to take the desired storage actions into account. Such as drying, cooling, and keeping the product temperature constant. This knowledge is all incorporated into the program. In practice, this means that fans will run more evenly throughout the day, as much as possible in periods with the lowest electricity prices, in conjunction with other factors such as temperature and relative humidity. When you have multiple storage cells, the controlling is also linked to priorities. For example, a storage cell in which the storage temperature deviates the most from what is desired will sooner be due for a ventilation action than the storage cell in which everything is in order.”

This article has originally been published in the Aardappelwereld of January 2023 (Dutch: ‘Stroom besparende EMS-module en beter energiemanagement’)

Do you want to conserve energy in your storage?

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