Going Green … with Wireless

Companies are increasingly adopting wireless sensor network technology to optimize energy usage and reduce environmental impact, reports Madanmohan Rao.

2007 witnessed a global level of importance accorded to environmental impacts of human and industrial enterprise. Thanks in part to Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize for raising international awareness about global warming, phrases like “carbon audit”, “environmental impact” and “green solutions” are becoming more popular and important than ever.

Today’s most dominant industrial design trend has no less lofty a goal than saving the Earth, according to Forbes magazine. Green eco-friendly products are no longer a fringe niche movement but are entering the mainstream. And so are the designs of new industrial spaces and upgraded factory floors.

And from eco-friendly furniture to energyconserving industrial plants, green advocates are examining and evolving a number of energy-saving technologies, including on-demand wireless sensors and machine controllers in factory floors.

Environmental advantage

Industrial companies are increasingly adopting wireless sensor network (WSN) technology for green reasons as well, not just operational efficiency, according to research firm ON World. These include reduction of the environmental impact of their processes, and optimization of energy utilization.

Wireless sensors and controllers offer a number of advantages in this regard: no expensive, cumbersome wiring to be activated; self-assembly so that nodes can be added or removed at will; energy consumption patterns that are less heavy; and open the door to more effective tracking of energy needs in industrial plants.

IEEE802.15.4 and ZigBee are the clear winning technologies for WSN solutions in commercial buildings. In 2007, nearly two thirds of all deployed WSN nodes in commercial buildings were based on IEEE802.15.4 and four out of five of the building control market leaders have ZigBee based WSN products, says ON World.

“The deployment of wireless sensor networks in industry could improve overall production efficiency by up to 10 percent in addition to reducing industrial emissions by more than 25 percent by 2010,” according to Gideon Varga, Sensors & Automation Technology Manager for the US Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.

Furthermore, number of companies are reportedly investigating WSNs for the creation and implementation of demand response networks (“smart power”), as WSNs can help create a far more responsive approach to power load management.

Green buildings

WSN technology’s clean and inexpensive system deployments will result in more buildings using less energy, needing less maintenance, and producing lower carbon emissions. By 2011, global revenues for WSN commercial building solutions will be US$2.6 billion.

Rising end-user awareness and demand, a strengthening value system, and hardening standards are increasing WSN adoption in green buildings worldwide. 25 percent of energy reduction in commercial buildings including industrial plants will be attributed to WSN in 2013, worth $7.4 billion in global energy savings.

Specifically, WSN opportunities are emerging in ventilation, heating, lighting control systems, metering, and condition monitoring.

“Energy management has always been a major driver for commercial buildings to adopt building control technologies, but now achieving Green status is becoming the primary driving force,” says Mareca Hatler, Director of Research for ON World.

Driven by social and economic forces, building and plant owners worldwide are adopting green solutions in order to increase efficiency, lower costs, reduce operational risks, and satisfy the demands of customers, employees, and shareholders.

In a recent survey, nearly two-thirds of building operations executives claimed to be familiar with WSN, one out of five are current wireless sensor users, and 61 percent plan to adopt an energy management solution.

Compared to only a handful of WSN players two years ago, there are now over one hundred WSN developers, integrators, and manufacturers targeting building controls solutions. Some of the largest global OEMs such as Assay Abloy, Hitachi, Ingersoll-Rand, Johnson Controls, Schneider Electric, Siemens, and Trane all have commercial WSN products shipping today.

Cost breakthrough

A new product line being rolled out by Sensicast Systems, a provider of turnkey wireless sensor network systems, is SensiNet Green Solutions, which can be used to monitor and manage energy consumption in commercial and industrial facilities. Such wireless industrial technologies can engender and support sustainable enterprises, according to Gary Ambrosino, CEO of Sensicast.

Energy usage evaluation and condition monitoring for electric machines are important in industry for overall energy savings. Traditionally, these functions are realized only for large motors in costly wired systems formed by communication cables and various types of sensors.

The unique characteristics of wireless sensor networks make them the ideal wireless structure for low cost energy management in industrial plants to replace the existing wired systems, according to Ambrosino.

SensiNet claims the “wireless advantage” eliminates costly wiring that can account for as much as two-thirds of the cost of installing traditional wired sensor systems. This cost breakthrough greatly expands the range of options available to customers for power and energy monitoring and management. It also makes extensive “sub-meter” monitoring possible on a broad scale. Sensicast solutions have helped the headquarters of Ferreira Construction in New Jersey, win the NJ Clean Energy Award for its leadership in renewable energy and energy efficiency.

In summary, the “going green” slogan is not just environmental rhetoric but a call to action as well for the industrial community. A wide range of options must be evaluated in this regard, including wireless sensors for energy reduction and monitoring. The growth of media coverage of this vital issue, as well as competitions for best green designers and practitioners in industry, is a welcome trend on this front.

Madanmohan Rao

SensiCast

Alliance for Wireless At Frost & Sullivan’s recent Asia Pacifi c Industrial Wireless Technologies summit in Kuala Lumpur, Eliza Leung met up with Hesh Kagan, Chairman, Wireless Industrial Networking Alliance (WINA), who provided an insight on some of the major initiatives the organization has planned for 2008.

In 2008, WINA is focused on three major areas: the website (www.wina.org), roadshows, and webinars. Together, these will cover a lot of territory for us, and it’s a lot of activity for any organization. The website is a repository of all things that interest to wireless and a place where people can go for unbiased information. One of the things we want to do for this coming year is to develop an area on the website where we have members upload documents of interest – white papers, activities they’ve been doing, experiences they’ve had using wireless in the industry. These don’t have to be scholarly papers. They don’t need to be academically rigorous kinds of documents. We’re just looking for people to share what they are doing. So this area of the website is not intended to be “the gospel, or the way that things have to work”. Rather, it’s as an area you can go to find out what people are doing, what experiences they have at face value. Right now, we don’t think that there is a place on the Web where you can get that kind of data, so we hope this will develop into a nice thing for WINA. The roadshow is a WINA sponsored one-day training session that we can take to various countries. The rough agenda would be: an overview of wireless; an overview of standards; the current situation; the roadmap of wireless technologies; how people are using wireless today. Some companies will do this wearing an Invensys hat or an Emerson hat, and that’s fine; but we’re going to do it wearing a WINA hat. We’re not pushing any one solution, we’re not pushing any one technology. We’re just giving people the background that they need. So that’s the roadshow. Then there our webinars. There is pent of demand for information, for people wanting information on wireless. We advertised our first webinar with ISA back in March 2007. We don’t know how many people tried to sign in, but all we could handle was 500 people. So we ran it again and got another 400 people. So that’s a tremendous amount of activity. We hope to do six or seven this year and would like to get much more into users talking about their experiences, as more and more complete solutions get developed. So we suspect that over the year, we’ll be able to get a number of users talking about a fair number of sophisticated solutions that they’ve implemented. Because that’s essentially what people want to talk about. Hesh Kagan, Chairman,WINA.