Renewed importance of electricity monitoring and demand control in South Africa in light of Eskom’s announcement that in future it will be directly load shedding the City of Ekurhuleni customers.

“Long gone are the days where South Africa generated enough electricity for domestic load and even exported to neighbouring countries. Electricity usage, demand and network limits and the continuous load shedding and Eskom’s requests for all South Africans to use electricity wiser, are probably one of the highest talked about topics in South Africa. In large industries, it is not so easy to install alternative energy solutions and also not always viable,” said Wessel Watt of Watt Industries.

“In the August 2022 edition of Castings SA, we reported on the installation of an electricity demand management system at High Duty Castings. A year later we have followed up and are reporting on the success and challenges of the installation,” continued Watt.

“The Watt Group performed an analysis on our energy usage, and we agreed on a limit that we were comfortable with to ensure that we still meet our production targets. This limit would have reduced our electricity demand by over 20%,” explained High Duty Castings’ Managing Director Brad Venter.

“We always take a conservative approach with our analysis and recommended demand limits. We all know how important power is to foundries and the dangers of over promise and then you under deliver. We were confident that with our Watt Demand System we would be able to realise the project at High Duty Castings within the agreed limits,” added Watt.

“Graph 1 shows the demand profile for High Duty Castings for July 2023 and one can witness the different tariffs that were managed and regulated by the Watt Demand System.”

“After the successful installation and commissioning of the system at High Duty Castings, the company also invested in additional measuring equipment to monitor the consumption of the individual furnaces. This equipment was integrated into the Watt Demand System to enable collection, storing and displaying the various consumers’ consumption. It is possible to connect various types of meters for mediums like water, gas, air and others to the system and this can also then assist in ISO 50001 compliance. The reporting software from the system can be used to give a lot of insight into the data by using some of the latest reporting types like the Sankey chart and other types of graph displays,” continued Watt.

“With the assistance of Wessel Watt and his team, we reviewed and analysed our electricity data from the system and we saw that it would be possible to reduce our demand limit with another 300kVA as the system was able to show us that if this was done in prior months, additional regulation of the furnaces to achieve this saving would have only been needed for 3% of the time. We implemented the new demand limit from 1 June 2023 and have been able to save an additional almost R 45 000.00 in the first month. Remember this is over and above the savings we were already enjoying thanks to installing Watt Demand System over a year ago,” said Venter excitedly.

“The system can not only regulate the main consumers to protect the set demand limits but can also be used to reduce the limits should a foundry be part of the Eskom curtailment programme. The system can assist users to accurately, in real time, display the plants usage and therefore users are able to know exactly what their previous consumption was and then be able to reduce it at the required 20% or 30% that Eskom would require in line with the curtailment requirements,” said Watt.

Atlantis Foundries
“We have also installed the Watt Demand System at Atlantis Foundries. The system assisted them to optimally manage their demand levels and was instrumental in them being an active partner in the Eskom curtailment programme and allowing Atlantis Foundries to keep the foundry operating albeit on much lower levels of electricity consumption,” said Watt.

“These two installations are testament of the success of the system. If ever there was a time to invest in technologies to assist in you better understanding, monitoring and management of electricity costs in foundry or company, it is now. Of course the bonus is the real savings of cash that you make.”

For further information contact Watt Industries on cellphone 083 652 2007 or TEL: 012 111 7677, email wessel@watt-group.com or visit www.watt-group.com