Granville Biogas Monitoring
Granville Energy Supply (GES) is a Transportable Renewable energy company and is Ireland’s largest Anaerobic Digestion facility.
GES is currently the all island market leader in Ireland in the production and trading of Biomethane, and was the first company in the Country to produce this fuel and transport it. The Biomethane is transported across Ireland to power various Combined Heat and Power (CHP) units using their specially designed trailers. The company also fuels maintenance vehicles with Biomethane as an alternative to fossil fuels.
Project Requirements
GES faced a number of challenges and issues with the day to day running of their sites due to workflow limitations. Visibility of their sites data was limited to logging in via Teamviewer or RDP and all meters were read manually, with no ability to provide auditable HHD, resulting in the use of NIE (Northern Ireland Electricity) meters. Also, a mix of different metering equipment manufacturers resulted in different interfaces and mechanisms for data retrieval. All in all Granville’s large team of Engineers managing geographically dispersed assets faced many operational challenges.
Efficient monitoring and management of the facility is key to the successful day to day operational running of the Digesters and Granville engaged with Everun’s sister company izon to develop a platform to help them achieve this.
What we delivered
Like many companies operating remote facilities, Granville used a remote connection to a computer (or HMI) to manage their generating stations. We implemented the izon monitoring system to collate all live data from across the portfolio. Applications like Teamviewer or VNC worked well for investigating on-site issues, but required an operator to proactively log in to check the status of a site which could lead to a lag between an issue occurring and it’s detection. Using izon, the information for all sites is simultaneously displayed in a user customisable, mobile friendly dashboard allowing full visibility of the assets.
Granville now has automated ROC meter reading from multiple brands of meters including Elster, Autometer and Schneider and these produce reconcilable readings for monthly reporting. Also, by displaying the generation status and the hours of methane remaining Granville can plan deliveries more efficiently.
Alerting on the system is also configured to notify the Operations Department when generation has failed or a trailer is low on methane.
Other features implemented include:
- Live Site Monitoring and alerts system.
- Customer notifications on any event, such as alert on engineer visit
- Daily/Monthly Metering of LFG, Biomethane, AD or Mixed fuel sites.
- Half hour meter reports for audits
- Automated completion of Ofgem submission template
- Logging Engineers on and off site
- Customer Billing
The system has also enabled the Granville team to manage their team of field engineers with more flexibility and transparency whereby they can schedule work, manage faults and report and record issues using pre-defined templates.
