With global supply shortages and shipping delays affecting supplies around the world, it has never been more relevant to emphasize maintaining and utilizing the equipment you have to the best of its abilities. Power quality issues such as harmonics, voltage spikes, swells, sags, and power interruptions, can all harm your equipment.
Large and critical buildings can not afford to waste energy or suffer service disruptions due to power outages and electrical problems. The answer is incorporating a power monitoring system (PMS) into your process controls, purpose-built software that will help you to simplify your power management.
Why install a Power Monitoring System
A power monitoring system provides an easy way to automatically retrieve and analyze power quality events happening at your site. Unlike your building automation software (BMS), PMS extracts event data giving you a complete overview of what has occurred, rather than just counting the number of events. And unlike software that comes out of the box with power quality meters, a PMS is customizable to automatically raise the alarm of significant events with the potential to cause damage within your facility.
Power Monitoring Expert (PME) by Schneider Electric, is the PMS we use and recommend as it is the most powerful energy and power quality management system. It is a highly intelligent system; allowing you to understand event causes with advanced power forensics, identify patterns, monitor protection settings, and track system capacity to avoid overloads.
Key Features you should look for in a PMS
- Reporting
PME can simplify reporting by performing formal audits, metrics analysis, and cost allocation to evaluate operations, reveal and validate savings and identify abnormal energy usage.
- Compliance
PME ensures compliance with aggregate data across processes, generates compliance reports that meet regulatory standards ( DS3), identifies KPIs and complies with common IT practices.
- Safety
Keep your people and assets safe. PME monitors breaker protection settings, detects abnormal conditions that risk safety, and locates insulation faults.
- Cyber Security
PME is designed to align with your comprehensive grid cyber security policies. When integrated within your security-driven architecture, the meter helps minimize vulnerabilities to your critical power assets and systems, reinforcing your security strategies. Its capabilities can be customized by our team to your specific needs, policies, and requirements, offering you a tailored security package.
- Alarm Management
Receive email notifications or SMS when power disturbances (sag/swell and transient) happen onsite with detailed info and waveforms. Customize your alarms for any device in PME (e.g. overcurrent/voltage/power or communication issues)
- Third-Party Integration
PME has the ability to pull data from various sources (including other systems onsite like BMS). This enables us to provide advanced solutions that monitor various metrics that have adverse effects on electrical systems.
- Waveform recording/analysis of PQ events
Your BMS can note that an event has occurred but that does not give you any reasons for the event occurring. PME offers waveform recording and detailed analysis of power quality events as they happen on your site so that you gain a better understanding of what is happening, why it is happening, and how to rectify it.
- Customization
PME is one of the most customizable PMS in the market. It allows our team to build you frameworks within the software for different applications like:
- Controlling devices e.g. Wind turbines, Active harmonic filters
- Record WAGES systems data (Water, Air, Gas, Electricity, and Steam)
- DS3 System Services
- Recording harmonics data on site
Why chose us to install and maintain your PME
Premium Power is one of the few companies to achieve the coveted EcoXpert Master Partner status from Schneider Electric for our Critical Power systems and solutions. We are experts in designing and deploying energy management systems, implementing advanced metering networks, and power quality management. We assist large and critical sites with managing energy costs, improving the reliability of their electrical systems, and optimizing equipment performance.
To get started with PME, request a phone consultation here, or request a demo from one of our experts.
