Customer Connects 112 CHP Units to Cat Remote Asset Monitoring (RAM) Premium
What Happened?
Caterpillar supported Eneria, a dealer in France, to install Cat® Remote Asset Monitoring (RAM) Premium on multiple customer plants sites, with 112 natural gas and biogas gensets in over 100 locations. Eneria provides 12- and 15-year full-service Customer Value Agreements for those installations.
What Was the Underlying Cause?
Customers choose a combined heat and power (CHP) solution over a traditional diesel genset, allowing them to produce and sell electricity, while generating the heat required to run their businesses at the same time. A CHP solution is ~80% more efficient than a traditional system with a diesel generator set and boiler.
The CHP solution includes a Cat gas or biogas generator set with the whole system of auxiliary installations, including heat exchangers, fume and noise traps, catalytic converter, and other system elements. Those installations can be placed in the special genset room or as an external container/mobile plant with simple connections to the site’s gas supply, electrical distribution network, and heating systems.
The main applications for CHP solutions are greenhouses, district heating, and biogas plants.
What Was the Value to the Customer?
Cat RAM Premium with Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) allows customers to monitor not only the generator set but also the whole CHP installation. The Balance of Plant (BOP) data includes temperature and pressure information from heating circuits and pumps, the positions of the valves, and much more.
Cat Connect RAM Premium allows Eneria to manage long-term service contracts in more efficient way, regarding the technical and legal aspects. This includes maximizing the plant availability in terms of power and heat generation, gas consumption, and optimization of the service operations. Further to that point, Cat Connect generates detailed reports, providing the historical data of plant performance and predictive expert suggestions.
This system will be a part of Eneria’s upcoming control tower architecture providing monitoring and expert support for their customers.
Connecting the CHP installation to Cat RAM Premium allows the customer to improve the plant availability and to decrease the cost of the maintenance, while keeping the peace of mind with real-time streaming data and insights.
For more information, please visit www.cat.com/catconnect
