Break Through Power & Energy Barriers with Ignition

Speakers

Benson Hougland

VP

Opto 22

Rebecca Gillespie

Managing Director

Energy Systems Network

What’s the power of tracking your organization’s energy use? Understanding your energy data reduces your operational costs, and helps you assess equipment health and meet regulatory or ESG guidelines.

It’s hard to manage what you can’t measure. In this session, you’ll see how to quickly incorporate energy monitoring into your Ignition projects using free Ignition Exchange resources. Plus, you’ll hear from a State of Indiana representative who created the Energy INsights program that helps Indiana-based manufacturers address energy use while taking steps toward digitally transforming their business operations.

Transcript:

00:00
Rob Huddleston: Hello, I'm Rob Huddleston, and I'm a Technical Trainer here at Inductive Automation, and I'm gonna be your moderator for this session. To start things off, I'd like to introduce our speakers today. Benson Hougland is the Vice President at Opto 22. With 35 years of experience in information technology and industrial automation, Benson drives product strategy for Opto 22 automation and control systems that connect and secure the real world of OT with the systems and networks of IT in the cloud. Benson speaks at trade shows and conferences, including IBM Think, Arc Forum, and ISA. His 2014 TED Talk introduces non-technical people to IoT.

00:38
Rob Huddleston: Becca Gillespie is a Managing Director at Energy Systems Network. Becca joined ESN as a Managing Director in January of 2023. Prior to that, she had worked as a New Products and Services Lead at Duquesne Light Company and was a Sales Director and Product Manager for Unit Energy Technologies. She also worked at Federal Energy Regulatory Commission as an Energy Analyst and as a Propulsion Engineer at NASA.

01:07
Benson Hougland: Fantastic. Thank you, Rob. Welcome, everyone. Glad you're here. It's been a long ICC. Well, not a long one, but a great ICC. Everybody enjoying themselves? Had some good sessions and whatnot?

01:21
Benson Hougland: Right on, right on. That's good to hear. Thanks for hanging out all the way to the end to be here. I appreciate that. In the spirit of this year's ICC, of course, which is "Breakthrough," the title of our presentation is "Breakthrough Power and Energy Barriers with Ignition." So again, thank you for attending this afternoon. And thank you to all of you out there on the virtual sessions. Glad you could join us as well. As you guys know, these sessions will be recorded. So, as Rob said, my name is Benson, and I will be your host for this journey from your energy-consuming devices into Ignition. And as Rob said, I'll be joined by Becca Gillepsie. Gillespie. Sorry, Becca. And Becca is a customer of Ignition, of course, and of Opto 22. And she's gonna have a great story to tell you about her project in Indiana.

02:17
Benson Hougland: Now, I've decided to forego the obligatory Opto 22 slide and just... Well, if you don't know Opto, we've been around 50 years. We are a Southern California-based manufacturer of hardware and software. And we've been in business for 50 years. We've got thousands of applications all over the world, including one hopefully you just saw at the Build-a-Thon. So, yeah, we're involved in that as well. So, with introductions out of the way. Oh, not really. I love this drone shot. I got a drone. I thought, oh, this would be fun. So, that is our factory. And, indeed, it's in Temecula, California, about an hour north of San Diego, which makes it about eight hours south of here. And it is where we design, manufacture, support everything. So, indeed, all of the stuff I'm gonna talk to you about today that's relative to Opto is, indeed, made in the USA.

03:12
Benson Hougland: Alright. Now, with introductions out of the way, quick review of today's session. I'm not gonna read that to you. You've probably read it already, and that's why you're either here in person or have joined virtually. But, in short, we're gonna cover why monitoring power and energy in your facility or your organization can be beneficial. So, we're gonna show you how you can quickly start doing that with a pretty simple product and Ignition and get you on your way to doing some interesting things with energy. And then, following that, Becca will come up and discuss her Energy Insights program.

03:50
Benson Hougland: Okay. So the big question. Still got mic? The big question is, why? Why are we gonna monitor energy? Well, probably the obvious reason is, what? Save money? Typically, that's what we see. And there's no question you can actually do so. And there's a couple of reasons why. The big one is, well, there's several big ones, but one is that rising cost of energy. We heard Becca on a panel earlier this week talking about that's some of the things the state of Indiana and all across the country, in fact, across the globe, we are dealing with rising energy costs. The other thing that we're having to deal with is something called dynamic pricing. So now you're getting charged a different value for your energy based on when you use it. And then we have another situation where we have what we call phantom loads or phantom... Basically devices that might be in your plant that are using a lot of energy that you don't even know about and are adding up on your bill. But the big one, this one right here at the top, the demand charge. This is something you're probably not even aware of.

04:53
Benson Hougland: And let's be frank. You're probably not paying the power bill for your plant. Somebody else is. But, indeed, a demand charge is one of the highest parts of your bill. And what is it? A demand charge is when you're pulling energy from the grid into your plant, you're gonna pay for that over time. That's called kWh, right? And so how much you use in a month, you get charged for that. But you also get charged for the largest amount of peak power you use during that billing cycle. And that means when you fire up all of your loads within a facility, you may draw a whole bunch of peak power at one time. They peg that. You get charged for that. We are a manufacturer in the state of California. Energy is expensive here in this state.

05:39
Benson Hougland: And, indeed, when we started doing this, we ate our own dog food in quite a big way. That was the biggest part of our bill. Our demand charge was more than our consumption. So tracking that down is really important. Bottom line, you can't control or monitor your energy costs without actually monitoring your energy in the first place. Now, there are some other reasons why power and energy monitoring might be important. And it has to do with the health of your equipment. Putting an energy monitoring device on your equipment is like putting a stethoscope on there. So we can start getting some really valuable information.

06:15
Benson Hougland: For example, let's say a pump was starting to... You know, the current draw was starting to go up on a pump or a motor or something like that. And we see that happening over time. It may be a reason to call somebody in maintenance or set an alarm or something like that to go take a look at that asset before something damaging occurs to it. So that's a big one in understanding the health of your machines. And then, finally, we have something here called ESG guidelines. What are those? Environmental, social, and governance. Bottom line, it's a sustainability framework for people to monitor or at least track what their sustainability footprint looks like. And for those of you who did attend the keynote with Kat earlier in the week, clearly she made a pretty big point about how important sustainability is. And, in fact, a lot of that keynote was.

07:07
Benson Hougland: So there's a lot of companies that have to address these guidelines or other regulatory compliance goals. And, again, you can't do that if you're not monitoring your energy. Okay. So enough about why. Let's now start talking about what it looks like and how. So what I'm gonna do, I'll start using this thing. We're gonna do something that's an architecture build-out. If you've been to one of my sessions before, you know, I love putting pictures up and going through that flow. Now, don't worry. I'm gonna get into some of the details of each of these steps. But just as a big-picture look, let's take a look. We've got our energy loads. And you can see those up there as, in this case, an air compressor that provides machine tool air because this is what we have in our own facility. And, yes, we are tracking that.

07:53
Benson Hougland: And then just another nice image up there of an electrical hydraulic press. And, indeed, what we do is we monitor these devices by connecting RIO EMUs up to them. And I'm gonna get into that detail a little bit more. Once we do that, these RIO EMUs just fit right on the LAN, on your Ethernet LAN. So once they get on the Ethernet LAN, I'll use my PC or workstation, and I'll configure that device. I'll go in there. I'll create an account. These are cyber secure devices, by the way. So they're IT friendly and so on. More details on that in a moment. And then once I've done that, I'll configure the load, basically the size of the load. And then I'll turn on the built-in OPC UA server. And once that configuration occurs, I'm now ready to start configuring Ignition, which we'll get into. We'll configure the OPC UA client here in Ignition to the OPC UA server in the RIO EMU, and we'll start building out our application.

08:50
Benson Hougland: In fact, I'm gonna show you how simple it is to build this application and the reason why. We have Ignition Exchange resources. In fact, if you were at the Build-a-Thon, you saw there was an honorable mention for Alex Marcy's with Corso Systems, that Exchange resource. We're gonna use that to make it really easy to start pulling this data in. Okay. From there, where can you go with this? Well, clearly, I'm a big MQTT fan. I'm also a huge fan of Ignition Cloud Edition, and that's the next logical step.

09:24
Benson Hougland: We can use MQTT to start to get this up into, say, Ignition Cloud Edition or, frankly, to any software that can consume the MQTT data. For example, Snowflake. Maybe I'm gonna start taking some of my energy data and throwing it up there to Snowflake for analytics, for storage, all kinds of stuff. So aside from the fact that you've already got all this power in Ignition for reporting and historical, alarms, and so on, now we can extend that functionality very, very easily. So that's really cool. And, in fact, Becca's application she'll talk about is using a component of Ignition Cloud Edition. And I'd be remiss to not say that, yeah, the real EMUs also support MQTT natively. So we could actually connect directly to the cloud from them, but we're gonna keep this simple. We're just gonna go with this configuration here. Very, very simple EMUs to Ignition. You all on board? Let's see the steps.

10:20
Benson Hougland: There's not a lot of steps, but there's important ones, so let's get going. These are all the steps, and I'll go through these in detail. But the big ones are, as you can see in the bold text, we're gonna identify energy load. We're gonna instrument it. We'll connect and configure. We'll get those resources, import them into our Ignition project, instantiate the UDT, and drag and drop into Perspective views. Once we get past that load side of connecting the load, it's literally five minutes to get this stuff up and running. But first, most important part, what load are we gonna measure? There's a lot of different examples there. A lot of these we use in our own factory, the compressors, HVAC systems, but presses or industrial refrigeration, there's a lot of big loads that you may want to look at, not only for cost savings again, but for load health and reliability.

11:11
Benson Hougland: So pick those loads, but keep in mind when you pick those loads, consider that you wanna look not just at consumption over time, kWh, but you also wanna be looking at what the demand is. So another way to look at it is when you fire up a big load, like say it's a big motor, what you would look at the energy profile for that, you'll see it goes...

11:32
Benson Hougland: Way high when it starts up, and then it tapers off, and then it kind of rides out. That peak part, that's what we wanna pay attention to. So once we've identified our loads, then we're going to sensor or instrument them, and we're gonna use something called CTs, these are current transformers. All they do is take this current that's on a given load, and they take it down to a secondary voltage, in this case, 333 millivolts, making it really safe and easy to work with. We also wanna probably choose clamp-on CTs. Why? Because it makes instrumenting a load much, much easier. We're not gonna have to unwire the load and stick donuts on and all that. We can just clamp it on. The big thing we wanna do here is choose the right CT or sensor for the size of the load. The picture I have up here is a 600-amp sensor, so as long as the load is 600 amps or less, this CT will work, but there's all kinds of ranges that are available everywhere. You can even buy these on Amazon, and they're about $100, $200 each, so pretty straightforward there.

12:38
Benson Hougland: We're gonna use CTs, and then we're gonna connect those CTs directly to the groov RIO, the groov RIO EMU, I should say. More on that in a moment, but we're also gonna tie into the voltage line right into the RIO as well, and the beauty of the RIO EMU is it will accept up to 600 volts AC directly to that unit, which is very cool, so we don't need potential transformers and so on. We have power over Ethernet, or you can use line power, and it supports a number of different load types, so maybe some of you guys are like, okay, what is an EMU? No, it's not an Australian bird. It's an energy monitoring unit, and that's what we're gonna talk about for just a minute. This is not a sales pitch, but to put it in the context of the kind of tool we're using, I'll briefly go over this. 64 channels of data coming out of this device, both power and consumption, so it's actually tracking over time how much energy you're using. 3-phase, single phase, you decide, delta or Wye configurations, PoE or line-powered, cyber secure, out of the box, and IT friendly.

13:51
Benson Hougland: Uses DHCP, it uses DNS, it uses all the tools that IT uses to manage devices on a network, so it's a first-class citizen on any Ethernet network, and it's all browser-based configuration. So there's a web server inside, and all I do is connect the web server, and I start configuring it. There are some other nice features in there, USB for Wi-Fi and so on, but it does support a lot of different protocols, MQTT Sparkplug B, OPC UA, and for those of you who are still clinging on to your Modbus registers, yes, that is supported as well. And again, it's compatible with all kinds of different current transformers. And there's a laundry list of stuff over on the side, again, outside of the scope of this presentation, but know that this has got a lot of cool stuff inside that solves real problems like remote connectivity, and it can even run a control program if you want to do that, but we're gonna keep it simple. We've got the RIO EMU on the LAN. Now we're gonna... Once it's connected to the network, we'll create an admin account. No default passwords, no backdoors, anything like that. We'll set the hostname, set the time, set the certs.

15:03
Benson Hougland: We'll configure the load type and the current and voltage values, and then we'll go and configure the onboard OPC UA server. Now what we're getting from these CTs and the voltage is two things: current measured in amps and voltage measured in volts. Those are the two primary pieces of information you need to start gathering all this information about, again, consumption relative to cost and health and reliability of a given load. Once we have that load type in there, again, it's just the size of the load and its configuration, then we'll configure the onboard OPC UA server so that we can get here into Ignition, and indeed we'll just use the OPC connection page right within Ignition, connect to OPC UA. It goes out, discovers the OPC UA server on the RIO EMU. If we just go through the wizard, couldn't be any simpler. Ignition's done a great job of making it really easy to connect to OPC servers. Once that's done, you give your new OPC connection a name, something unique to that particular load, whatever it might be. It could be a compressor, it could be a press, it could be whatever.

16:16
Benson Hougland: Once I have that done, now I'm ready to start making the job easier. Now, yes, you can just right from here start building your tag, dragging over OPC tags, your tag provider, blah, blah, blah. But we made it really easy for you. What we've done is we've created... I've worked with Corso Systems and Alex Marcy to develop these UDTs and Perspective templates that are freely available from the Exchange. Log in, download these, get them onto your computer. Once you've done that, we're gonna go ahead and import those into Ignition. First, what we're gonna do is import the UDTs. Pretty simple. I go for import, go where the file you placed on your PC, and boom, just hit that single step. I now have my UDT definition already ready to go in Ignition. So while I'm here in an import phase of my project, I'm gonna go ahead and import... Oh, yeah, I think it was already going down to that.

17:14
Benson Hougland: Let's go back to here. Once I get that, I'm gonna import my templates. So pretty simple there. All your templates and styles will come right in, and look at that. Under the Perspective folder, RIO EMU Template. We named it specifically so that it wouldn't overwrite perhaps some other styles or templates you might be using. Okay, we're in good shape there. Let's move on. Next thing, instantiate the UDT. We have the UDT definition. Now we're actually going to create the device in a tag folder. So we go new tag, data type instance, the UDT itself, and I fill out a set of parameters. Now this is cool because what we're doing here, look at these parameters. You're actually modeling the load with this parameter dialog. So I can give the load a name. I can give it its location, its install date, what the load phases are. I'm literally modeling my load. So I'm not just looking at volts and amps, right? I'm looking at a load, and it's configured all within that UDT.

18:16
Benson Hougland: So that makes it real simple to start moving the data up with context. Super important. So here we are. I'm pulling in this load, and I did pull in the compressor from Opto 22, so these are all real numbers. Yes, that compressor draws 39 kW when it's running, providing tool error to our manufacturing plant. Cool, huh? Next up, we're going to literally create a new view. I just choose the defaults here, and I'm gonna click on the UDT, and I'm gonna drag it to the canvas. And boom, there it is, all done. All I've got to do is resize it. It's fully responsive, so you can change its size around and do whatever you want. I've got it. I'm gonna save my project. Here we go. I'm gonna go load it up and launch Perspective in the URL or in the browser. Voila, how cool is that, right?

19:09
Benson Hougland: It's so simple. It's so simple. Now, these are free Exchange resources, so you can do whatever you want to them. You don't like the Opto red at the top? Hey, I won't take it personally. No worries. All of that is available, and as you saw, I can click through different tabs. I can see all the phase information. I can see all the totals, and I can see what? The modeling information. That's a Sullair LS-10. It is indeed on our manufacturing first floor, and the load type is 300 volt RMS wye instead of a delta. So, there's my completed application. Here, all I did was bring on two loads and the same thing, and I used the Perspective default template to put it in there, and now, within, again, just a few minutes, I now can see what my energy is doing for any given load. I can do the whole building. I can choose different loads, whatever you want, but it's really cool, and I did it all with this little guy. So, while Becca's getting up, 'cause that's who's up next, I'm gonna pass this little RIO around. So, it has my name on it, so yes, I'd like it back.

20:16
Audience Member 1: So it's signed.

20:17
Benson Hougland: Yeah, it is signed. It's autographed. And I do have an Apple tag in it, so don't try to walk away with it. So there you go.

20:35
Benson Hougland: Got mic. Test one.

20:39
Becca Gillespie: Is mine working now? Not yet. Okay. Oh, now it is. Great. Alright. Thank you, everyone. So, yes, I would like to share with you a little bit about how we use this architecture in the Energy INsights Program in Indiana. So the Energy INsights Program is a state-sponsored program meant to provide free deployments of pilot projects for small-to-medium manufacturers in the state of Indiana and show them something about their energy consumption and get them started on their digital journey. It's paid for by the IEDC, the Indiana Economic Development Corporation. Oftentimes, EDCs are seen as just whale hunters getting that next chip factory or battery factory, but they also, at least in Indiana, try to keep existing manufacturers competitive, it's a lesser known mission of theirs. But it's important, and keeping them competitive is what they're after in this program.

21:42
Becca Gillespie: Our program would be nothing without our integrator partners, because I'm just one person at ESN. I don't implement each of these pilot projects, and we work with Axiom, LHP, recently Brugh, Blue Ridge, who's here today, TensorIoT, MartinCSI, and NineTwelve. We would also be nothing without our vendor partners, Benson, of course, at Opto 22, and Inductive Automation, and then we have some channel partners who are also in the space of helping people begin their digital journey.

22:19
Becca Gillespie: Great, so Benson did a great job of explaining why energy is important, and Energy INsights in particular has these dual goals of helping them start on their digital journey and help them reduce their energy costs. But just to reiterate, one thing is, we want every small-to-medium manufacturer to understand and reduce their energy costs, and we think that it's a good pilot project because everyone pays for energy. It's something every manufacturer is paying for, and everyone is using, and so in that way it's easier for that to be a shared and make shared resources that are applicable to everyone. And they're also rising energy costs, as Benson mentioned. Another thing is they're not competitive, so can create a better space for collaboration, because one person reducing their energy cost, even if they're in the exact same field, really doesn't impact directly someone else's reducing their energy costs, so people can work together. You just both are paying the utility less, which is, you know, good, even though I used to work for one.

23:24
Becca Gillespie: And then there's all the other uses of energy data, which Benson mentioned, but also I've seen some really cool presentations here about how interesting amp data is because, you know what? It is the heartbeat of your machine. So, yeah, I don't love when people use it for that, but that is really cool, and I love to see how people are figuring out the health of their machine with amps. And then the GHG requirements.

23:50
Becca Gillespie: Essentially, just to describe the program at a high level, as if you were small-to-medium manufacturers in Indiana, which I know most of you are not, but just so you understand, essentially half of the grant goes towards the hardware and the software package we give. That's, as I mentioned, Opto 22 and Inductive Automation, and a little bit of extra money for the current transducers and the boxes and the other things that they may need to get it started, and about half the money goes to time spent with an integrator to deploy, integrate, work through all those IT/OT challenges I've heard so much about, and then also, hopefully, once all that's done, help them develop a real custom use case with their energy data or with their other data in their plant that kind of meets their needs where they are at that moment. We also have a pretty light training program, just meant to help people understand how to use their starter kit, what is energy data, why might they want to look at it, what are the things they're seeing there, what is their energy bill.

24:52
Becca Gillespie: We help them... We do a short training on upskilling and where to go next after this, and another training on scaling. So a lot of the whole purpose of this product is that they can grow with it, it can grow with them, so we do a training with them on that. But what do we hope that they walk away with? For one, we want them to have actual measurable insights. We want to measure a KPI of dollars saved, and we want them to really walk away with that knowledge so that they can chart their own course through the Industry 4.0 landscape. So if at the end of the program, no offense, Benson, it hasn't happened yet, but if they threw the starter kit in the trash, and they said, "But I know what I do want," that would still be a success for Indiana. And luckily, like I said, that doesn't happen, people really end up liking this starter kit. And of course, understanding energy data.

25:50
Becca Gillespie: So why energy data? What is so exciting about energy data? As Benson mentioned... Well, for starters, I mean, saving energy is a big project. There's a lot of things that a small-to-medium manufacturer can do that an energy auditor can help them do. An energy auditor walks through your plant and tells you everything that's going on at a single point in time. So I always recommend manufacturers who are in the energy space and want to save energy, do that too. Getting everything at once, but at a single point in time is really important. But data over time helps you in a really different way. One of the key ways that data over time can help you is with that demand charge reduction, as Benson said. Reducing one's demand charge, it's more of an art than a science.

26:34
Becca Gillespie: Your demand charge happens whenever all your loads are firing at the same time. And you can't really... You have to almost play with sometimes the startup sequencing, which is basically the corrective action to startup sequencing often, or the, sort of finding of natural storage. Natural storage would be like your building can stay cool. It has a thermal capacity. So you could pre-cool your building so that your AC's not on when you're also firing your big equipment, finding natural storage opportunities. But sort of flattening that peak, taking... Maybe you're using the exact, oops... I don't know how to... Oops. Maybe you have the exact same energy, you know, the integral under that curve hasn't changed, but now it's flatter, and you save a whole bunch of money on your energy bill. The other is energy efficiency. Some of the examples... And examples from the program of demand charge reduction have been just that, startup sequencing. We have someone who's working on changing the way they process things with respect to when their solar's online, and figuring out ways to flatten their demand curve.

27:40
Becca Gillespie: And one that just came on that also wants to sort of optimize when multiple pumps are running at the same time, because they have some flexibility, so that they don't have as big of a demand charge. The next is energy efficiency. For that, some of the... Again, that's where, you're actually measuring that area under the curve, the amount of water you drink, if you sort of think of the water analogy. It's energy efficiency. And so for this one, how does data help? Well, yeah, it is good for you to have that energy audit. They walk in, they say like that there's a leak in your compressor system, or there's, that motor's way too old, and if you bought a new one, it would pay for itself in three months. Great information. But the leak in the compressor system is also something you could discover with data over time. So if you're monitoring your energy every day, it's going up, and up, and up, you know something's wrong. Now you're using more energy than you were a month ago, probably there's a leak in there. Another one has been, that's been used for a lot in Energy Insights is justifying an investment. So some people compare like an old line to a new line, figure out how much energy they save on the new line, and then they can justify some investments or upgrades to their old line.

28:58
Becca Gillespie: And in one particular case, a customer was able to save 20% off their energy bill by figuring out how much a VFD would save them, and then watching that change, and then installing VFDs throughout all of their fans and their system, and running it at a low. It's essentially running it at an optimized speed instead of just a fixed speed, which is what AC motors do. But yeah, again, most people wanna use it for other, the other category, which as I mentioned, you've heard a lot about today, we had one group work with this to do sort of an OEE, a very rough OEE of their equipment, how often was it running above a certain kilowatts, to get a sense of how often that equipment was on. Another one of our base dashboards does a part counter, which again, it just looks for those humps in the amps, or actually in power, because we wouldn't just use amps, because we're using Opto 22.

29:54
Becca Gillespie: So it looks for those humps and says how many times did it go above this many kilowatts, and then you can also measure sort of kilowatt hours per bump, so you can get that sort of production real time, how much energy was per part, if these are parts. Now often we're testing these things on Benson's data, so I'm counting cycles on a compressor instead of actual parts, but one of our customers is using it now for their part counting. And then, so monitoring, just the most simple one of monitoring when equipment is on or off. So this is the architecture. We are very similar to the one you just saw, and I learned a new word this morning, so I'm excited to say I think our UDTs are referencing, they're referencing Benson's UDTs, and we take that same information that he gave, the raw data coming out, and do some information with it.

30:57
Becca Gillespie: You have to plug in someone's demand charge, dollars per kilowatt, you have to have all these dashboard features, and where it's located, what the temperature is there, things like that. So we have all of our dashboard-related analytics and configurations referencing the UDT that Benson made, and then we have a base dashboard set that helps these people get started. I actually forgot to mention this one, production, that's actually an old version of it, but production is just kind of on or off. I guess I don't have one with the part counter. Anyway, but yeah, essentially energy, power, and so on. But yeah, essentially the program gives people three points in their plant, so we often advise them to do something that looks like it will be an interesting study, or the three biggest loads, and then we do allow for the on-the-cloud version, but because so many small-to-medium manufacturers are not yet ready for that, we also have an on-prem version as well.

32:00
Becca Gillespie: But that's pretty much it, what makes Indiana unique. I went into this a bit yesterday, but there really aren't a lot of other states that say the best way to digitize is through helping people pilot it. Often there's just the workforce development aspect, but I think that this is a really unique program because of that. It wants to... It doesn't just train the people who are working on it, and trust me, our training is not training them, it just points them to Benson's many YouTube videos, and Inductive University, and gets them very barely started, but getting their hands dirty is a really great way to learn. But also it trains the CEOs, it gets them used to it, it gets them comfortable with it, it gets them thinking about smart manufacturing differently. So I think pilot programs are a great way to do it. But yeah, that's pretty much what makes Indiana unique. So I think that's all my time, any questions?

33:03
Rob Huddleston: Okay, well thank you Benson and Becca, let's give them both a great big hand.

33:10
Rob Huddleston: So we do have some time for questions. Please raise your hand, and please wait for a microphone, the streaming people can't hear if you just ask.

33:27
Audience Member 2: Alright, I'll be green. Becca, are those smart dashboards available on the Exchange?

33:32
Becca Gillespie: You know, they aren't right now. I'm learning about the Exchange right now. I think when they're mature... I mean, they're pretty mature. But they're not there yet.

33:41
Audience Member 2: The quicker you give it to us, the more than we can play with them.

33:43
Becca Gillespie: Yeah, yeah, sure. Okay, I mean, yes, I think I can make them available on the Exchange, and the reference UDTs. I think, not knowing that word, I had a hard time explaining it to people, but it sounds like that would be meaningful to you. If I told you what a reference UDT was, you'd all get that, it sounds like.

34:01
Benson Hougland: A reference tag to the UDT. So that's...

34:03
Becca Gillespie: So it's like...

34:04
Benson Hougland: The references.

34:06
Becca Gillespie: Yeah, I can't say...

34:07
Benson Hougland: The engine tags that are coming.

34:09
Becca Gillespie: Yeah, I didn't know how to explain that before.

34:11
Benson Hougland: And just so you know, Becca and the state put this program together, they also paid for the development of these dashboards. And indeed, she's been willing to share. So Becca did share with us these dashboards, and we just launched a pilot project for McDonald's stores in Southern California. So they're using the same templates that Becca's team put together. So indeed, I think that's our next step. Let's get these guys on the Exchange as well.

34:48
Audience Member 3: While we're getting that figured out I can ask my question. When we talk about historizing data, have you found like a sweet spot for how quickly to save energy data so that you can aggregate it into like a total monthly usage?

35:10
Becca Gillespie: How quickly? So I usually take Benson's raw data, which comes out once a second. His 64 data points come out once a second. By the way, he's actually can get harmonics off of his, Opto 22. He's measuring at 4,000 hertz, and then turning it into many data points, including harmonics, real and reactive power, all of these things. But I take that once a second and use it... We've only basically compressed it with dead bands as opposed to compressing it further. But it is a little bit cumbersome sometimes to access the long data for monthly reporting. So actually, they take a lot of load. So if you guys have suggestions on that.

35:52
Benson Hougland: Yeah, we offer both kW and kWh. And I think that's important because the kW, of course, is real-time power at a given moment in time. Great for dashboarding real-time values. But the devices are also capable of storing the data, the kWh, which can be remotely reset, say at the end of the shift, at the end of the day, at the end of the month. So now you can start collecting that data too. But when you get it into historization, yes, you're probably grabbing those sample data and store them in a historical database. But I think...

36:22
Becca Gillespie: I should add, yeah, for the peak power, actually when you need to aggregate the kilowatt number, it doesn't actually make sense to do anything more refined than what your utility is using. And 99.9% of all utilities use a 15-minute data window for their peak power calculation. Now you might not hit the exact same 15 minutes as they're hitting. And so you might get it off. But we do collect 15 minute, we have a separate data point that's just on the 15-minute data. So that's a good way to get the peak over the course of the month. And then, like I said, for the... Like Benson was saying, for over the course of a month, you can look at the end energy and the beginning and subtract them. And that's a pretty good way to do it. He collects that every 30 seconds.

37:08
Benson Hougland: Yeah. And that UDT, when you download it, you can get into the UDT and we're actually doing the calculation for the interval data in the UDT. So we're getting that 15-minute kW and it's at the top quarter, half past the hour, set on the time of course of the gateway. And also kWh, 15-minute interval. So you know how much you consumed over that time.

37:32
Audience Member 4: Okay. So you mentioned you were at FERC. So you probably know what an ISO is.

37:37
Becca Gillespie: Yes.

37:37
Audience Member 4: ISO, that's the world I deal in at the grid level.

37:41
Becca Gillespie: Oh, great. Yeah. Love that.

37:43
Audience Member 4: Okay. So my question in this program is you're talking about peak demand, which is a utility chart...

37:48
Becca Gillespie: Yes. Yeah.

37:49
Audience Member 4: But are you anything with like 5CP or are you're... Not yet? Oh, good. We're...

37:54
Becca Gillespie: No, we're not. I wish we were. I'm so excited that you asked that.

37:57
Audience Member 4: I'll help you do that because that's a revenue stream...

38:02
Becca Gillespie: I know.

38:02
Audience Member 3: That they could tap into. 'Cause are these customers using wholesale or retail?

38:07
Becca Gillespie: So most of them are retail. They often do have access to demand-response programs. I literally don't wanna use the word "demand" to describe two things. Like when I say demand charge and they're just learning about that for the first time.

38:18
Audience Member 4: Right. I don't wanna confuse you.

38:19
Becca Gillespie: And then I go here demand response. This is a totally different thing about the hottest day of the year. So I haven't breached it that much, but I like would so love it. In fact, we had a utility tell us.

38:30
Audience Member 4: We do that as a company.

38:31
Becca Gillespie: Love that. Yes. I would love to talk more...

38:32
Audience Member 4: I'll talk to you after this because we have... We actually, I think, knew about you guys...

38:38
Becca Gillespie: Oh, cool.

38:38
Audience Member 4: Doing this and I'll talk to you afterwards about helping you with the peak demand, that kind of stuff.

38:42
Becca Gillespie: That's really great.

38:43
Benson Hougland: Yeah. We've been involved in DR programs at NYSERDA, at MISO, at CAISO for dozens of years. We're on our own DR program at Opto. Oh, perfect. Yeah. PJM. That's another one we did.

38:56
Becca Gillespie: One of our partners actually told me one of the reasons that they have a hard time implementing DR at manufacturers is because the utility cannot tell them in a real time what they're consuming. And so when they say, go down to one megawatt from three, they can't say if they've succeeded or not. And that has been a huge hurdle for them. So they said, why don't we put all these Energy INsights programs in those? But you know how utility... I mean, I used to work for one, so I can bad mouth them. But yeah. So, you know, they can't really work with you very effectively. So typical. No. But I would love that. I would love that. Yeah.

39:42
Audience Member 5: So I was just gonna answer some questions that were asked. Brandon from Blue Ridge. So the integrators are working together right now to put together things for the Exchange. We're mainly working on converting ICE to on-premise. So that helps answer that question. Once we have it all packaged and vetted out, we'll get those out there. And then as far as seeing the historical data and how we can aggregate that, we ran into some issues with Power Charts and the way they were working. So we're working on building custom components to show the aggregated data better, if that helps answer that question.

40:12
Becca Gillespie: Yeah. Thank you, Brandon. Yes.

40:14
Benson Hougland: Yeah, that's exactly...

40:15
Becca Gillespie: One of our beloved integrators.

40:16
Benson Hougland: Yeah. And Blue Ridge did a fantastic job on some of this early templating and the Perspective styles and templates and styles. And that's another reason why I'm really excited about 8.3 and the new Power Historian. So I think we're gonna see some really cool things there in terms of storing this kind of energy data using the new Power Historian.

40:46
Audience Member 6: How would an Indiana small business get involved or an Indiana integrator get involved in this?

40:53
Becca Gillespie: Great. Yeah. Great question. For the small businesses, we have a website. It's energyinsights.tech. I probably should have plugged that here at the end.

41:01
Benson Hougland: Yeah, I just never thought about myself.

41:03
Becca Gillespie: I'm the worst. So but yeah, and then essentially that contact form goes to me and that would be a way to get involved. We don't really have a process for growing our integrator base. We're kind of just doing it as the program grows. So we have just grown to include Brugh recently and we haven't necessarily expanded beyond that. But certainly we're looking for additional sustainable funding options. We're looking at other states for sustainable program opportunities. The DOE just released a grant that was for basically exactly at this intersection of smart manufacturing and energy. So as those grow, we can open that capability again. But as we are, we're just working with this group to try to continue to churn through the projects.

41:47
Rob Huddleston: One more question.

42:02
Audience Member 7: Thank you. This was pretty good. Are you seeing this... And you did mention this briefly, we're going out to other states or other countries, this process that you worked out, which is government-funded support to small-and-medium sized manufacturers?

42:19
Becca Gillespie: Yeah. So there is, like I mentioned, there is this DOE grant, but we didn't necessarily have other states submitting on our behalf for that. That was due on Monday, sadly. But maybe your state submitted it and it is, I can send you the link if you come up after and you can see if your state went after it. And then there's SESAME, it kind of works in that same intersection as well. They do pilot projects in the intersection of energy and...

42:51
Benson Hougland: Smart factory.

42:51
Becca Gillespie: Smart factory. They're not as so prescriptive as this. This is kind of a unique... It's a little bit prescriptive for some people's tastes, which I understand, but it's also a way to get started. You know, pros and cons. But they're less prescriptive. They're more of a, like, choose-your-own-adventure pilot. And then Purdue is starting a ManuFuture program. And it's manufuture.net. And they may work with us to continue to pilot these programs. But no, I think we'd still be open to sharing it with more states and countries. It just hasn't happened yet.

43:28
Rob Huddleston: Alright. Well, thank you again.

43:30
Becca Gillespie: Thanks.

43:30
Benson Hougland: Thank you, everyone.