The program allows you to gain visibility into the real time consumption of electricity at three locations in your factory. By interpreting this data, you can justify behavior changes, repairs, or upgrades that can save you the most money. It can also help you catch changes, degradations and anomalies in your consumption patterns that may indicate a failing machine or another issue with the process.

Energy INsights intentionally uses a software package, Ignition, that is a well-known industry SCADA system. It can connect to all types of industrial data sources so that you can use this system for various applications. The integrators will spend time deploying the energy sensors and the energy-related dashboards. The integrators will also work with you to determine how to customize the system best. For some, that may be creating more dashboards or analytics around energy that are very specific to your needs, but for others, that will be helping you begin to collect, analyze, and visualize data from other sources. Energy INsights also includes a small budget for custom design elements, like additional sensors or necessary computing hardware, to allow you to customize your project further.

Every participant will get a starter kit (over $12k worth of hardware and software) and time with an integrator to install and integrate the starter kit and execute a custom pilot project to meet their factory's specific needs. At the end of the program, you should have: 1) A quantifiably valuable pilot project deployed and working. 2) The real-world experience to take your next step down the smart-manufacturing journey better. 3) A better understanding of your plant's energy consumption and ways to save money on your electric bill.

Energy INsights is ongoing real-time electricity data from three loads, along with connections to other data sources in your plants that are of interest. An Energy Audit is a walkthrough of the plant at a particular point in time to find wasteful practices, inefficient machinery, or conservation opportunities. The Energy INsights data will be able to catch degrading performance or anomalous consumption patterns that crop up. In contrast, the Energy Audit will suggest changes that are visible at a single point in time. Both are valuable ways to save energy.

The state grant covers the cost of the starter kit (hardware and software), the integrator's services to launch your pilot program, and educational workshops. The participants are asked to give their time (at least 60 hours over the six-month pilot period) and cover any costs to make the electrical connections to their loads.

This free program is meant to help you understand what it takes to build a smart manufacturing system. We want you to be a smart buyer of other technologies and have a basic system setup that can collect the data from all of those technologies in one place. Manufacturers will learn more by getting their hands dirty building out a pilot project using a standard starter kit than sitting in a classroom and trying to parse the many vendors and technologies out there. If, at the end of the program, you decide not to keep the starter kit at all, but you understand what you DO want and can chart a course to get there, the program would still be a success in the eyes of the IEDC.

The engagement with the program integrator will take three to six-months to complete. Upon completion of installation, the customer will have one calendar year of system maintenance costs covered. It is expected that savings will be generated during this period. The hardware and on-prem software licenses will be kept by the customer indefinitely.

If you choose to cease service after the first year, the company is able to retain the Energy Monitoring Kit and associated hardware and on-prem software at no additional cost. If the customer chooses this option, they will still retain functionality of all dashboards, analyses and tools built in the on-prem software, but if they have chosen to augment their storage or software options to the cloud, they will have to continue to pay those services into the future.

The annual price will depend upon the solution provided. For some solutions (e.g. on-prem deployments), there are no ongoing costs, except for system maintenance. For other solutions (e.g. Cloud deployments), the cost will be $500 - $700 per month to keep the system running.

Before you begin, the integrators will clarify ongoing costs with you, so there are no surprises.

The Energy INsights Monitoring Kit has sensors and edge computers that collect data and could interoperate with multiple data storage, analytics and visualization tools. Those tools could exist in the cloud or on-prem. The program will create a clean, well-defined data interface and give the customer the software and engineering services to build out their valuable use case. But if the customer elects to change to another data storage, analytics of visualization tool in the future, they can.

The starter kit includes two to three Opto-22 Groov Rio EMU’s which will measure the voltage and current of the three-phase connected load 4000 times per second, and report back 64 data points each second (details).

The customer's machine and facility energy data will always remain private and is not shared as part of the program, except where the customer chooses separately to share their data with other customers during knowledge shares.

Energy INsights also includes a small budget for custom design elements, like additional sensors or necessary computing hardware, software, or services. If you want to purchase more sensors outside of the program to include in your pilot use case, that is possible, too. Just so long as you work with the integrator to make sure their scope of work (e.g., integrating all the additional sensors you are adding) is something that the project budget can cover.

If you opt for the Cloud deployment, Energy INsights will fund one year of an instance of Ignition Cloud edition, running on a virtual server with 4 GB RAM and 100 GB storage. (details)

The key benefits of the cloud are that the cloud edition includes all modules of Ignition for unlimited users and unlimited tags (limited only by the memory of the virtual server it is deployed to; see above). It also includes a full support package called “TotalCare,” where the Inductive Automation technical team will help you build custom analytics and dashboards independently.

It should be noted, however, that the ongoing costs for the customer will be $6,000 per year to stay the same size. If, after one year, you want to move from the cloud to an on-prem server and continue to use Ignition, the participant would have to buy the software for their local use, and it would require some work (by the integrator or internal staff) to move the data and redeploy the data pipeline.

If you opt for an on-prem deployment, Energy INsights will give you a base set of software from Inductive Automation to start collecting, historizing, and visualizing your data.

This includes the Ignition Platform, the Tag Historian Module, and two to three sessions of Perspectives (see details). If needed, Energy INsights can provide a small, on-site server. The software is yours to keep at the end of the one-year timeframe.

If, after one year, you want to move from on-prem to the cloud, there would be some work to move the data and redeploy the data pipeline. Also, the customer would incur the cost of the cloud service. You could surrender your license for the on-prem solution if you choose.