Sparks Electrical News March 2019

INDUSTRY 4.0

14

UNDERSTANDING KNX WITH MATTHEW CARTER

SIEMENS OPENS ADVANCED ROBOTISED AND DIGITISED BATTERY MODULE FACTORY IN NORWAY

KNX AND SMART GRIDS: HOW KNX RF IS BEING USED TO EMPOWER THE CONSUMER IN FRANCE

Trondheimwas chosen to be the location. “In Trondheim, we have established a competence centre for electrical and hybrid solutions with years of experience. This has impressed global management so much that we are now responsible for the development of new battery systems,” says Anne Marit Panengstuen, CEO of Siemens AS. Until now, the market has been largely driven by electric ferries, but fishing boats, workboats for aquaculture and offshore plants also offer great potential for the future. The factory recently received its first order to assemble batteries for use on a drilling rig.

tery module, the whole factory is com- pletely automated. One battery consists of nine battery modules, each module consists of 28 battery cells. So far, Norwegian companies have led the way in the electrification of shipping. As a result of the global decision to invest in maritime battery systems, interest in Siemens battery solutions has grown on the international market. “We see interest in such solutions outside Norway. The new battery factory will therefore also serve an international market,” says Brath. Due to Norway’s pioneering role in electrification and Siemens Trondheim’s technology and production environment for electrical solutions in ships and offshore applications,

SIEMENS has opened one of the world’s most advanced robotic battery module factories in Trondheim, Nor- way. In the future, 55 battery modules per shift will be assembled every day for the marine and offshore market. “We expect this market to grow sig- nificantly in the future. That is why we have invested in the development of safe and reliable battery solutions,” says Bjørn Einar Brath, Head of Off- shore Solutions at Siemens. The factory comprises a robotised and digitised production line with eight ro- botic stations with a capacity of up to 300 megawatt hours (MWh) per year. From unpacking the incoming produc- tion parts to testing the finished bat-

Enquiries: www.siemens.com

A s South Africa comes to terms with yet another price increase for electricity, other countries are implementing smart grid technology. There has been a lot of talk about smart grids in the local media and everyone regards it as something that will be implemented at some point. Given Cyril Ramaphosa’s SONA speech and what looks like the splitting of Es- kom into generation, transmission and distribution businesses under a state holding company, it would make sense to empower consumers not only to choose who to buy power from, but also to actively manage their consumption. France realised that its national grid would face increasing demand back in 2012. The country embarked on a programme to enable smarter management of its grid demand by implementing a system that could communicate with all energy consumers and cause active energy demand management. The programme was piloted in the city of Lyon in 2015. It proved successful and as a result Enedis (formerly ERDF) is replacing all electrical meters in France with the Linky smart meter. The programme is scheduled for completion by 2021. All 35 million Linky meters have an RF module, which enables the KNX RF Multi and ZigBee protocol. For those of you unfamiliar with KNX, it is a multivendor platform used for residential and commercial building automation. It is manufacturer agnostic so has over 450 manufacturers who make products for the bus. This ensures compatibility between manufacturers and ensures a completive pricing environment. It was developed over 25 years ago and has been adopted as a standard for building automation in a number of countries, notably, EU, China and most recently Australia. There are a number of suppliers of KNX components in South Africa and a number of integrators who are engaged in projects in all corners of the country. Tariff management The Linky meter will allow new services to the customer such as tariff management, whereby appliances adapt their behaviour to the best current or future tariffs. The Linky meter is associated with a central device in the house to provide the user with a display of current real-time consumption and production of electrical energy. It also can be as- sociated with control equipment, for example, electrical boilers or electrical heating, for energy optimisation. Furthermore, the user can profit from peak avoidance and load shedding by buying or offering energy at advantageous times. Dynamic tariffs are not a reality in South Africa at the moment, but given the current climate of energy scarcity, I should imagine this is something that is being seriously looked at. It would allow the consumer to make decisions about consumption and use technology to limit energy use to periods when the power is cheap. Standardisation and security The KNX Association’s KNX interworking group has worked on standardisation of the Linky meter functionality in the Application Note 179 ERL Channel. This defines all of the group communication objects, including all the parameters and function- alities. The KNX System Group improved security by adding a number of features to make it easy to implement. New data security requirements have resulted in some changes in KNX stack implementations. KNX Secure devices use encrypted telegrams so that traffic cannot be intercepted and manipulated. Integration The Linky Meter can communicate with a building over the two most popular proto- cols in the market, namely KNX and Zigbee. If the building has a smart system run- ning one of these protocols it can utilise the KNX or Zigbee components within the building to facilitate economic running of the building in conjunction with the utility. Conclusion The South African energy landscape is about to change and the adoption of these sorts of technologies is inevitable. To prepare for a ‘smarter’ future, those who own and manage buildings would be well served if they investigated implementing smart technologies into their buildings. Matthew Carter is the owner of KNX Electronic Components a KNX Systems consult- ant and wholesaler. In addition to this, as president of the local KNX National group he spends a lot of time promoting KNX amongst those involved in the energy efficiency space and the electrical trade.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE – THREAT OR SAVIOUR?

N ew technologies tend to see people react with scepticism, suspicion and fear, with some even becoming alarmist and broadcast- ing negative scenarios up to and includ- ing some pending cataclysm. And this has certainly been the case for Artificial Intelligence (AI). The reality is all our technologies are benign and any risk is entirely down to people and what they might do. In the case of AI, the advantages afforded to medical science are the most visible, well-known and radical with dramatic improvements in diagnosis, treatment and outcomes. Lives are being saved, survival rates improved, and the quality of life for millions of people upgraded. At the other end of the scale, the military is now using AI in robotic weapons for the sole purpose of disabling machines and killing people. Our job is to weigh up the good and bad versus the pros and cons. So far the balance sees an overwhelming weight of evidence on the side of AI being of great benefit and unlikely to realise the dystopian futures favoured by the extreme naysayers. AI is also making huge contributions to the world of commerce, finance and management. It controls investments, writes reports and reviews, models and predicts outcomes, controls production systems, conducts the testing of impossibly complex technologies, controls our logistic and transport systems. All of which we now depend upon. At a human dialogue level, AI is enriching lives by providing rapid access to knowledge and solutions to complex problems and situations. However, today’s state of play looks meagre, and a mere ‘window’ into a much broader and more powerful future. The wider opportunity, and the essential here, is the realisation of sustainable societies and green futures. Where does this all start? Industry 4.0 might seem the unlikely champion

performance with far less materials at lower energy costs than ever before. But this cannot continue without Industry 4.0 and AI. Although AI might already appear as magic, it is meagre compared to what is to come. In reality, our AI is on the very first rung of a ladder that ultimately leads to general purpose, and fully sentient, machines. Today’s AI progress in a replay of computer history with the task specific computers of the 1950/60s, and we have to buy task specific AI systems. The current generations of machines are outstanding at pattern recognition and learning, and in the past 12 months the big leap forward has been to see them eclipse their human programmers. This ability was not expected to be available for at least another decade. What most people don’t understand is that new technology begets even more powerful technology, and that is certainly the case with AI. Progress will not be linear, slow and predictable, it will be exponential, quantified, and it will take us by surprise. There really is only one big question to ask: can AI rise to the challenges facing our species with increasing shortages of water, food, fuel, raw materials and energy; with climate change and rising sea levels, on a planet managed by simple minded politics and economics? To sustain 7.5 billion people at some equitable standard of living demands greater intelligence, and we can only do it with the help of AI – it really is a ‘fait accompli’ that will change lives, living and work. This is an edited extract of a talk delivered by Prof Cochrane at the University of Pretoria’s Flexible Futures Conference, a higher education and innovation conference and expo. Prof Peter Cochrane, OBE was chief technology officer at British Telecommunications and recently became a Professor of Sentient Systems at the University of Sussex, Ipswich.

of all human futures but the reality is that it has to be a giant step towards low energy and low material use, with recycling, repurposing and reuse that works. What we know for sure is that we can’t power into the future on the basis of polishing our old industries and processes and making them more and more efficient: such a path only slows down the rate of demise and puts back the day of reckoning. The big change needed hinges on the realisation of new materials that do not occur in nature, they are shaping and forming into products with a high- efficiency of ownership and operation during their life. And crucially, the low energy recovery of all materials at the end of life. To do all this Industry 4.0 embraces key technologies: new materials created by biotech and nanotech; their transformation into products by robotics and additive engineering and material programming; the Internet of Things providing communication between everything along with embedded/distributed intelligence in all things to record their manufacturing processes, purchase and operational use in preparation for their end of life recovery. But the real key to all this is AI, which is already discovering new materials and new structures, whilst solving problems that are way beyond human capability. Today, we are at the peak of Industry 3.0 and we can progress no further, but even so our abilities are already formidable in that we are able to design and build over two billion mobile devices of incredible complexity (greater than a Cray 3 SuperComputer) and ship themto global customers working across multiple networks and standards. This ability is also reflected in every aspect of human activity from the manufacture of furniture, domestic appliances and office machinery to vehicles, aircraft and transport systems in general. We have progressively achieved far greater

Enquiries: www.knxsa.com

SPARKS ELECTRICAL NEWS

MARCH 2019