Digital insights speed SCA toward energy savings of 50 gigawatt hours per year
Thanks to bioenergy production, the industrial processes used by SCA, the Swedish packaging–material manufacturer, were already 95% fossil-free. SCA then announced a bolder, longer-term target: an entirely fossil-free value chain.
At SCA Munksund, Sweden – one of the company’s two kraftliner mills – 400,000 tons of packaging material are produced every year. The term “kraftliner” refers to paper or paperboard produced using the kraft process, which is massively energy intensive. This energy mostly goes into powering the mill’s electric motors – more than 2,400 of them.
But SCA’s operators understood that improving the efficiency of those motors could save a significant amount of energy. To identify where improvements could be made, they needed to better understand how the motors performed. So SCA contracted ABB to collect and analyze data from its motor-installed base before making expert recommendations.
The solution selected for the task, ABB Ability™ Condition Monitoring, enables the secure collection of data within different parameters over time. It is tailored to a facility’s specific operation and gathers data on temperature, operational patterns, stress levels, and more. The collected data can be analyzed and used to pinpoint opportunities to improve energy efficiency, reliability, and uptime, as well as enabling predictive maintenance.
Motors that do not meet energy-efficiency requirements can often be recycled and upgraded with new, more efficient models, lowering carbon emissions and energy consumption. In addition to energy savings, the motor-recycling process adds significant environmental benefits: securing the return of metals into the market saves a considerable amount of carbon emissions, energy, and water.
With the help of ABB’s digital solutions, SCA is now able to unlock deep, data-led insights into its industrial production processes. This once hidden information holds tremendous value, enabling SCA to cut costs, improve energy efficiency, and bring down carbon emissions.
“SCA’s objective is to improve energy efficiency through efficiency enhancements of at least 50 GWh per year based on the company’s energy consumption in 2020,” explains Anders Kyösti, Technical Manager at SCA Munksund. “Electrical motors account for a large part of our energy consumption. Given higher energy prices and the trend towards electrification, optimizing energy use will become even more important in the future. Information gained through monitoring and analysis is extremely helpful in increasing our energy efficiency.”
“Through data and analysis, the true use of the electrical motors is evaluated. The real utilization in time and power output is revealed, and thereby also the total power consumption. It enables us to very precisely suggest a replacement motor and quantify the annual energy savings as well as the reduction of reactive energy consumption,” adds Peter J. Isberg, ABB Motion Services Digital Lead, Sweden.
