Scalable business model for electricity efficient wood drying

Important results from the project

The main purpose of the project was to more easily implement Alent Dynamics´ energy-saving drying process at the sawmills. By increasing the installation pace for Alent Dynamic, significantly more electricity savings and movement of electricity usage in the sawmill industry are enabled. Our goals were to start a cloud-based data transfer, develop a power management module and work on our new business model, and that we have fulfilled.

Expected long term effects

The cloud-based data transfer makes installation easier. This means that Alent Dynamic can increase the installation pace and the customer gets started faster with energy-efficient timber drying and saves electricity. The power control can schedule when electricity and/or heat energy is to be used more or less during the day. Peak loads are managed by deciding in which order the various drying chambers should call for heat or use electricity. This also has positive effects in society as it affects the peak loads and relieves the daily consumption in the electricity grids.

Approach and implementation

We chose a cloud-based solution to be able to install faster. The basic requirement was that we would have access to all devices that could be relevant for energy management and that we would be able to control via soft PLC but also via regular PLC. The security issue regarding how we connect the customers to us took much longer to achieve than planned. After that, the processing of the data that we received and the work with the web interface, WMC and testing of the new software versions began and finally the evaluation of the data from the new system.