Energy costs are one of the largest manageable expenses on any factory floor: You can monitor and manage how much your plant consumes. And the stakes for improvement are rising, as energy usage climbs after hitting an all-time low in 2010, according to U.S. manufacturing energy consumption surveys.
But as production demands intensify and energy prices fluctuate, most plants still can’t accurately track or report on how much power their individual lines, machines or processes consume. It’s a blind spot that limits efforts to optimize the processes that reduce energy waste and allow companies to react to energy-consumption anomalies before they show up on the monthly utility bill.
If your operations group struggles to pinpoint where and why energy is being consumed, then you’re in good company. This problem persists across manufacturing because energy data remains locked inside incompatible systems, making energy consumption analysis difficult or impossible. But a new generation of edge-to-cloud solutions is releasing that data and making it usable.
Today’s energy data silos are decades in the making
Most plants weren’t designed to be integrated environments. They were built in layers as devices and systems from different vendors and eras were installed over several decades. Each layer speaks using its own protocol, and it stores data in its own format.
The result is what most manufacturers live with today: a stack of systems that can’t talk to each other. They’re owned by different teams, use different naming conventions, and rely on custom integrations that break when things change upstream.
Energy data can’t flow to the people who need to act on it. Answering a simple question like “What is Line 3 costing us to run today?” requires data from the energy meter, the PLC controlling the line, the production schedule from the MES platform and the time-of-use tariff from the utility. Because none of this data can be found in the same place or is structured in the same way, it takes hours (or longer) to find. By the time information is assembled for any near-real-time energy consumption analysis, it’s too late to change anything. The impact on operations is already felt.
What fragmented energy data costs manufacturers
As a result of this reality, manufacturers frequently report three operational challenges standing between them and their energy data.
1. Inconsistent measurement across assets, lines and sites
When every device uses a different naming convention and data format, the same KPI produces different results when it’s calculated in different places (for different lines or different sites).
For example, kWh per part might include compressed air load at one site; at another, it might not. Without a shared model of which meter measures which asset on which line for which product, energy benchmarking is unreliable.
Until energy data is standardized, every number will have to be cleaned and contextualized before it can be used to answer questions or inform benchmarking.
2. Data work is manual and can’t scale
Most plants that have built any kind of energy usage reporting accomplished it through manual integration: an engineer exports data from the meter vendor’s portal, matches timestamps with the MES export and tries to assemble findings in Excel.
If manual data capture and reporting—which are prone to data entry errors—is done only a few times a year, then maybe it’s manageable. But these processes become bottlenecks when things change. In other words, they don’t work when weekly tracking is needed, or when the plant manager wants to know why consumption spiked at 3am.
To keep up, energy usage reporting must run in the background continuously and automatically so data is ready whenever anyone needs it.
3. New platforms require more oversight, not less
Platforms that promise visibility often deliver yet another system that’s difficult to maintain.
For instance, many OT teams aren’t staffed for cloud operations. When a plant adopts a new analytics platform, the work involved with connecting plant systems, modeling assets, defining KPIs and maintaining the integration falls on people who are already busy running production. When this is the case, no one has time to build or maintain complicated cloud solutions.
Teams should be able to deploy platforms quickly, run them without constant oversight and let the people closest to the process use the data inside to answer their own questions.
A solution to power up energy consumption analysis
To tackle this visibility problem for manufacturers, Belden and Edge2Web have co-developed a joint solution powered by AWS IoT SiteWise.
The solution delivers intuitive, preconfigured dashboards and AI-driven insights built on a cloud-native, no-code platform that can be deployed in days. It gives leaders real-time answers to questions about energy consumption, production efficiency and sustainability KPIs … without requiring a dedicated data team to produce them.
How does the Belden + Edge2Web solution work?
The Belden + Edge2Web solution is built on two components that are integrated to create a complete, cloud-native energy intelligence stack.
1. Belden CloudRail: OT data at the edge
To deploy and acquire data from machines within minutes, Belden's CloudRail connects 30,000+ industrial sensors, energy meters, and OPC UA assets using a plug-and-play approach. Data acquisition, normalization, and contextualization are handled automatically to produce structured data. That data is transferred securely to AWS IoT SiteWise for downstream analytics.
2. Edge2Web Power Tools: analytics and AI at the application layer
Edge2Web Power Tools (EPT) provides AI-driven energy consumption analysis and visualizations that deliver instant insight into energy consumption and cost by asset, line, site, production run, etc. Custom KPIs, dashboards and scorecards are built without programming. AI-powered summaries, alerts and digital playbooks built on AWS empower operators to act faster without needing to be data scientists.
Impact of energy intelligence across the organization
As your organization scales from single-site pilots to global, multi-site deployments, this integrated solution scales with you: the value it provides only compounds as you add assets and locations. For instance, line-level energy tracking initially deployed at a single facility can be replicated across 20 facilities without redesigning the data layer. This intelligence allows companies to reconcile discrepancies between manual measurements and calculations vs. charges incurred at the end of the month or year.
How this approach improves work for everyone:
- CEOs and operations leaders have a single source of truth to rely on for energy performance across every site. Consistent KPIs make multi-plant comparisons meaningful and emissions reporting defensible.
- CFOs and financial analysts increasingly own, monitor, and manage energy consumption and costs as part of their audits and annual tax reporting.
- CIOs and CSOs don’t have to worry about building or maintaining custom integrations every time a different team needs a new view. They can focus on higher-value work while users serve themselves.
- Environmental health and safety (EHS) leaders can connect to a continuous stream of structured energy data tied to production output. Energy usage reporting flows directly into compliance reports, ESG audits and sustainability disclosures so they can be ready when requested instead of assembled under pressure.
- Manufacturing and plant leaders have access to line- and asset-level energy consumption analysis in real-time with alerts that bring anomalies (and their likely causes) to light when they happen.
Ready to turn your energy data into a competitive advantage?
Belden’s complete connection solutions, amplified by partnerships with other industry leaders and trusted technology providers, give manufacturers the infrastructure they need to turn raw plant data into insights that improve efficiency, savings and progress.
Whether your plant is in the beginning stages of its energy monitoring journey or your team needs to scale insights across a global footprint, the Belden + Edge2Web solution offers a path forward.