Power and energy management that does what it promises

What I do

Only as good as the data they get

A power management system and an energy management system are only as good as the data they get. Generators, switchboards, drives, propulsion controls and bridge equipment usually come from different suppliers, each with its own protocol and its own idea of what a signal means. My job is to make them talk to each other, and to check that what arrives on the bridge is what is really happening in the engine room.

The second half of the work is making the system do what the specification says. Synchronisation, frequency and voltage control, load shedding when the demand gets too high: it all looks fine on paper and often behaves differently once the real consumers are switched on. I test it with the installation running, and I adjust the logic and the settings until the behaviour matches the specification.

• Integrating propulsion, generators and switchboards into the PMS, with synchronisation and load shedding that hold up under real loads
• Coupling energy management and process control to drives and PLCs over the fieldbus and Ethernet
• Bringing navigation and engine data to the bridge over NMEA, and distributing it to every system that needs it
• Testing and tuning load shedding, frequency control and voltage control with the real consumers switched on
• Finding the fault when the data on the bridge and the state of the engine room do not agree