35 www.drivesncontrols.com September 2023 FOOD AND BEVERAGE n Cake-maker bakes in savings worth £54,000 FAMIEL CONFECTIONERY, LOCATED IN Yokohama, Japan, produces and sells cakes and other types of Western confectionery. As well as marketing products under its own name, the company also manufactures frozen cakes for hotels and restaurants across Japan. The company’s cake-making ovens use substantial amounts of electricity. “The three ovens in our factory account for about a quarter of our overall electricity use,” explains Hideyuki Moriya, general manager of Famiel’s production department. “Power consumption reaches its peak when these ovens are all turned on – our contract power is determined based on this peak.” Since 2015, the company has been visualising its power consumption by installing energy monitoring systems (Mitsubishi Electric EcoMonitors) on its ovens and other key equipment. “When we visualised our energy consumption, I was able to understand many things – not only about how much electricity the ovens were using,” Moriya remarks. “I also learned that the machine we use to wrap the cake in film did not use as much electricity as I originally thought. When such data was made available to the factory floor, it attracted the interest of our workers and made them think about how they could save more energy.” When Famiel moved to a new factory in 2017, it expanded the number of items whose energy use it monitored. It also installed an energy-saving data collection server (Mitsubishi’s Eco Web Server III), and introduced energy demand monitoring and management throughout the factory. Collecting data In the new factory, Famiel more than doubled the number of machines that it was monitoring. It also decided to measure the amount of electricity it was using for air conditioning, as well as how much water and gas it consumed. “In addition to the cost to re-install the system from the old factory, we had to invest nearly twice as much to upgrade the system,” Moriya recalls. “I was, however, quite confident that we would be able to get a good ROI since we had already saved more than we spent for our initial investment.” The monitoring system visualises how much energy each item or air conditioner consumes. It issues alerts in three stages depending on the level of demand to prevent the total consumption from exceeding the contracted power level. If an alert is issued at the third stage – which means that demand is nearing its limit – staff turn off some machines to keep the demand within the limit. A Japanese confectioner has cut its running costs by more than £50,000 by implementing energy management and demand monitoring facilities in its bakery. It can now visualise the consumption of key resources – electricity, water and gas – in real time. By changing the sequence in which it turned on its ovens, Famiel was able to cut its contracted power level without affecting its working hours By monitoring its real-time electricity demand, the Japanese baker controls power consumption and avoids exceeding its contract demand level. Images: Mitsubishi Electric, Japan
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