Ekip power controllers, an energy efficiency solution

This work is motivated mainly by the the worldwide growing energy demand which is an issue that governments, industry and research institutions have to face constantly, making mandatory for them to adopt strategies that provide a more efficient use of electric energy instead of just increasing the generation capacity. In that sense, ABB, a world leading company in power systems solutions, has developed a power controller which makes use of a patented algorithm to decide whether a load in an electric system must be powered or not at a defined time instant and according to given power limits. The goal of this work is to show the design and development process of a software tool that is able to manage the Ekip power controller. This works begins by facing the energy efficiency problem and then shows the power management solution given by the previously mentioned controller and the software tool here developed. The analysis should help shed some light on this new and exciting energy management concepts, and should be especially useful to professionals in power generation, load control and programming fields, or anyone else who may be interested in electric energy management.