- Success Story
SFW’s digital service solutions are helping power producers around the globe to overcome their age-old challenges - whilst embracing a more sustainable energy future. Read on to find out how our Envelope solution is making a difference to innovative Swedish district heating provider, Mälarenergi.
Make informed decisions
SFW’s digital solutions monitor process data 24/7, giving customers clear actionable insights in real-time. It’s something that’s proving invaluable to Mattias Lindholm, Power Plant Operator at Mälarenergi: “Having data available in real time makes a big difference in the decision-making process of operating the boiler because the more information you have, the better conclusions and decisions you can make.”
His colleague, Fredrik Winge, agrees. “It makes a huge difference when I know what to do instead of just guessing.”
Drive efficiency and commercial success
With careful integration digital services can help you reduce maintenance and operating costs while improving efficiency, performance, availability, reliability and even energy output itself.
Real time analytics give operators a uniform way of reacting to various situations and help them make sure operations are optimized every day. They can help you optimize sootblowing and boiler cleaning cycles, detect boiler leakages faster, minimizing secondary damages, and help to avoid uncontrolled downtime due to bed material sintering.
The Envelope solution provides us with a number where it's safe to operate the boiler at higher than maximum capacity. It makes a big difference in our ability to plan and optimize our production of electricity and district heating.
Support your sustainability goals
Right now, companies across the globe are changing the way they do business to contribute to the world’s transition to net zero. And it's no different at Mälarenergi, as Energy Strategist Marianne Allmyr, shares: “Sustainability is a key factor that drives us in our core business. Doing things more efficiently is a way of doing things more sustainably - using less to produce the same, or even more.”
For many energy providers, the focus on sustainability means a reduction in the use of fossil fuels which can bring its own challenges. “From a technical point of view, fossil fuels are pretty easy”, says SFW’s lIkka Koskinen, Director, Service Agreements & Digital Services.
“But if you are moving to non-fossil fuels such as biomass waste-derived fuels, you get much more complexity in your combustion process. That's where our digital solutions are the perfect help for customers to maintain high availability, high reliability and even higher power than the original output.”
Integrate with ease
SFW’s digital services are designed to be user-friendly and integrate seamlessly with your workflows. And, as with all SFW services, they are offered on a life-time basis: as long as you’re using an SFW solution, we’ll be here to support you.
Our flexible subscriptions promote extensive use with flat fees, regardless of the number of locations or users.
Mathias Edelborg, Asset Manager at Mälarenergi’s Unit 7 agrees that simplicity was a key factor in the swift acceptance of the new solution. “The operator's view is easy and well designed. The interface is very good. They can trust the info. I saw directly that they wanted to follow it and that's important.”
Keen to find out more?
SFW’s extensive domain knowledge means we can guide you through the selection and adoption of new energy generation, analysis and optimization technologies that will shape a cleaner, more efficient future – for the good of your business, and for generations to come.
The decision to start using this product was very easy. We don't have any initial costs and if we find out that we want to stop using this tool we can stop anytime we want to.
Getting Envelope into use is actually pretty straightforward.
We use the existing sensors, there is no shutdown. It is just about making the data flow from your automation system to our cloud and then getting the analytics up and running and that's it. Boom!