OPINION | BEVERAGE bottling facilities are among the most energy-intensive environments in manufacturing, with consumption spread across production lines, utilities, and support systems, says Rezolia Muller-Potluri, lead: microgrid and end-user sales, Digital Energy, SSA at Schneider Electric.
According to a study from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), filling, cleaning, sterilisation, and packaging are major contributors to overall plant energy demand.
It is also estimated that a typical PET bottling line has an average total consumption of roughly 245 kW, with stretch-blow moulders averaging 157 kW.
Unfortunately, many bottling plants still lack granular visibility into energy use, relying on aggregate data that obscures efficiency opportunities. And without accurate data, energy cannot be effectively managed.
The cost of fragmented visibility
Many beverage bottling plants today receive a single, aggregated utility bill from the municipality, with little ability to verify its accuracy or correlate costs with actual operational consumption.
This lack of transparency underscores how easily operational and financial risks can arise. Without submetering or departmental-level insights, facilities are left struggling to:
- Allocate energy costs to specific production lines or processes.
- Identify high-consumption areas or inefficiencies.
- Validate utility charges against real usage.
As another example, limited visibility also sees maintenance and engineering teams work in a reactive manner, which is not conducive to an environment where issues should be addressed before potential failure. This is particularly true in the bottling industry, where restarting production lines is both time-consuming and expensive.
But addressing these challenges requires more than just installing meters; raw electrical data needs to be transformed in order to create actionable insights. This is where advanced power monitoring platforms like Schneider Electric’s Power Monitoring Expert (PME) add tremendous value.
These platforms offer a centralised, real-time view of electrical performance across the facility, which enables engineers to monitor, analyse and act on energy data from a single interface.
With connected metering infrastructure in place, facilities can:
- Access real-time visibility of energy usage and equipment behaviour
- Analyse consumption trends across departments and processes
- Track power quality and identify anomalies
- Generate automated reports on energy performance and cost allocation
Importantly, it offers remote visibility; data is available instantly from any connected workstation. Also, automated alarms further enhance responsiveness, notifying teams when abnormal conditions arise so that corrective action can be taken before issues escalate into failures.
Ultimately, this leads to proactive operations where teams can anticipate and prevent any potential breakdowns, improving both operational continuity and financial performance.
Tiered metering architecture
Effective energy management is more than software, it requires the right data, captured at the right points across the electrical network.
Here, a tiered metering architecture aligns measurement capability with various critical parts of the system.
At critical nodes – such as incoming supplies and key loads – advanced power quality meters like Schneider Electric’s ION9000 and PM8000 provide precise, highresolution diagnostics.
Beyond capturing voltage sags and swells, harmonics, waveform distortion and transients, these meters also deliver
millisecond timestamping, disturbance direction detection, and compliance reporting. Together, they enable facilities to pinpoint the source of power quality events, ensure reliability, and align energy performance with both profitability and sustainability goals.
