ODVA (www.odva.org), the automation supplier consortium that supports network technologies built on the Common Industrial Protocol (CIP), including DeviceNet and EtherNet/IP, reports it also will help industrial consumers control energy consumption from the plant floor to the grid.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that the industrial sector consumes half of the world's total delivered energy, making it the largest end-user sector. To help ease demand, ODVA plans to raise awareness of energy consumption, and offer control strategies that can optimize energy use throughout the industrial ecosystem. This approach will help businesses improve productivity and profits, and will also benefit people and our planet through better utilization of energy resources.
To begin to provide an overview of its vision, ODVA has introduced a white paper, "Optimization of Energy Usage." This paper is designed to help sustainability executives at industrial consumers and product managers at device vendors map out their product roadmaps to support sustainability objectives and business goals. It can be accessed at the ODVA's website.
Optimization of energy usage (OEU) results from the industrial consumer being empowered with the ability to make informed choices regarding the use and conservation of energy. ODVA's plan for OEU leverages the core competency of its information and communication technologies, which are grounded in its media-independent CIP. For OEU between processes and other systems in the production domain, ODVA seeks to include energy-oriented objects and services within CIP that permit the transparent and seamless flow of energy information and enable systems to perform energy metering and management.
"Energy is essential to produce products but has been an invisible line item on production bills of materials and consequently an unmanaged resource," says Katherine Voss, ODVA's executive director. "With its vendor neutrality, open participation and open technologies, ODVA provides the ideal forum for building consensus among market leaders in industrial automation around the next generation of productivity enhancements for industry."
