January 2011Analytical Instrumentation & Environmental Monitoring
Frank Diedrich, Siemens AG
Modern process analytics make renewable energies more attractive.
Modern process analytics reduce the costs and increases the availability of renewable energies. Industrial challenges and the appropriately optimised analytical solutions are discussed for biogas, synthetic fuels and photovoltaics. In addition to technology, the fields of competence which must be provided by a supplier of process analytical solutions must include customer orientation, standardisation, global presence, and project management.
Oil is too valuable to burn. Renewable energies are an effective approach toward solving the energy question. Permanent optimisation of industrial processes is a key to success. This includes the scaling of known processes with the associated expectations regarding cost reduction. The costs for alternative energies are decreasing, along with increasingly limited supplies of fossil fuels of increasing cost. Nevertheless, renewable energies are seldom a real competition to crude oil, and for this reason their use has to be subsidised. The point in time at which alternative energies will also become attractive without subsidisation is coming closer, and this can be supported by the intelligent application of process analytics.
A requirement for efficient automation solutions is that the actual state of the process is known in order to then intervene using advanced control procedures. The task of process analytics is to record material-specific parameters in industrial processes in real-time, eg, the concentration of individual materials in complex mixtures.
This article uses typical examples to describe a number of challenges encountered in the renewable energies sector and how process analytics can help toward overcoming them: the use of biogas as a primary fuel, synthetic fuels as an alternative to crude oil, and photovoltaics.
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