Yokogawa expands energy management offering

Company announces joint partnership, capital investment with Soteica Visual MESA. Video: Satoru Kurosu and Oscar Santollani explain the new relationship.

Bob Vavra

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Yokogawa has added Soteica Visual MESA’s energy management and optimization solution services to its portfolio of plant-wide energy management solutions. As part of the announcement, made on the opening day of the 2013 ARC Advisory Group conference in Orlando, Yokogawa announced it had acquired 44.3% ownership of Soteica Visual MESA, according to company officials, “to accelerate the joint development of EMS.”

“There are two components to energy management in plants. One is to make more efficient the supply and distribution of utilities, such as steam, electricity and fuel that are used by equipment in the main process, and the other is to optimize the energy consumed by the main process itself,” said Yokogawa officials in a press release explaining the joint partnership with Sotericsa Visual MESA. “Yokogawa has a competitive edge in control systems and advanced control solution packages for main processes, and helps its customers save energy by optimizing operations at their plants. At the same time, the company has lacked EMS for utilities that can be used to achieve the optimum mix of conventional and renewable energy sources, based on factors such as process operating conditions and energy prices. Until now, the company has had to devise solutions for such requirements on an ad hoc basis.”

Yokogawa officisals said Visual MESA “is capable of reducing annual energy costs by approximately 2% to 5%. There are approximately 3,400 plants worldwide with $40 million or more in utility costs each year that could benefit from Visual MESA and obtain a return on their investment in one year or less, and Yokogawa will initially be targeting these facilities.”

 “We are very excited about entering into this comprehensive partnership with Yokogawa as it will enable us to dramatically increase the exposure of Visual MESA, our industry leading solution for utilities optimization”, said Oscar Santollani, Soteica Visual MESA’s CEO.