La planta de cemento de Lafarge Holcim en El Salvador es la compañía líder en el país en la producción y comercialización de cemento, concreto y agregados de alta calidad.
Holcim se dirigió a ETAP para reemplazar su sistema de desprendimiento de carga lento y poco confiable que resultó ineficaz para preservar el sistema de energía contra las perturbaciones causadas principalmente por la red eléctrica debido al clima inestable y los rayos. Cada interrupción en la planta tiene un impacto de pérdida de producción de 1,2 millones de toneladas.
With Holcim’s power generators running continuously to support a power contract to provide power to the grid to help offset peak loads, the unscheduled outages were proving costly, not to mention compromising the plant’s goals of meeting its own requirements to maintain the process load operating 24 hours per day, every day.
The plant’s existing load shedding system were proving to be too slow and otherwise too limited in their ability to respond to the broad and diverse range of operating scenarios necessary to satisfy the operating conditions and business objectives of the plant. In fact, the existing system either would under-shed or over-shed the load causing the system to become unstable and resulting in partial or total plant shutdown.
With the help of multi-threading technology ETAP ILS determines, simultaneously and instantaneously, optimal amount of load to shed under various possible disturbances. Using intelligent grouping and sorting techniques, ETAP ILS determines exactly how much load needs to be shed and what combination of loads would help it reach that target in order to maintain system stability.
Holcim’s ETAP Intelligent Load shedding system remains fully armed at all times, ready to act on multiple scenarios depending on the specific conditions occurring at that time. The ILS system gathers system parameters throughout the electrical network, including the generation and loading status, to adjust its ever changing load shedding scenarios. By the time an event occurs, the substation (local) controls have already been instructed by the ILS system to act, namely, to switch loads as required to properly load the generators and keep the plant running.
The ILS system remains several steps ahead of the event condition by virtue of its constant monitoring and modeling of the entire electrical system, taking into account maintenance cycles, operational changes, or any last minute changes in process control.
The ILS system automatically senses changing conditions and responds with new instructions on continuous basis, allowing the system overall to react within 25 milliseconds or less to an event.