Ageing drives do not have to be discarded or replaced. Instead, businesses can act proactively and perform services that keep them operating at peak performance.
These life-cycle services can improve a drive’s reliability, extend its lifetime by up to 15 years, and enhance performance. In some cases, you can update certain components to the latest technology, providing new features and ensuring long-term support.
Because these services avoid replacing the drive entirely, they can avoid up to 80 percent of emissions compared to a full replacement. This makes them both a circular and cost-effective option.
Credit: ABB
Modernization
Modernization is one type of life-cycle service. This is a proactive service that upgrades the drive to the latest technology, extends its life for up to 15 years and enhances its performance. This approach avoids the need to fully replace parts of the drive that still function as normal, such as the cabinet and cabling. All in all, modernization can avoid up to 55 percent of CO2 emissions compared to replacing a drive with a brand-new one.
One of the benefits of modernization is that it can be carried out in line with a facility’s regular scheduled maintenance. For example, the internal components of an ABB ACS800 drive can be replaced with ACS880 technology all within an eight-hour maintenance break.
One example of the benefits of performing a modernization over a full replacement is Jämtkraft, the Swedish utility. By modernizing nine of its drives at its facility, it saved around 10 tons of CO2 emissions – the equivalent of a gas car running for 5 years.
“We completed retrofits on nine of our existing drives to bring them into the active phase of their life cycle,” said Anders Gjerstad, Automation Engineer from Jämtkraft. “Since we kept the existing cabinets for the retrofits, there were no substantial modifications to the current infrastructure. This reduced the overall expenditure, while also allowing us to execute the project more sustainably.”
Modernized drives offer all the benefits of brand-new ones but with a lower carbon footprint and less waste, all with minimal disruption to regular production.
Credit: ABB
Reconditioning for reliability
If a drive operates in a harsh environment where downtime is not an option, it can be fully reconditioned at a specialist service workshop. This goes beyond on-site maintenance and involves a thorough component inspection, cleaning, analysis and replacement.
All key components – like the insulated-gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs), thermal compounds, fan, capacitors and main electronic boards – are restored to factory levels of quality, minimizing costly unnecessary downtime. Compared to replacing the drive completely, this can avoid up to 80 percent of CO2 emissions.
Enefit Green, the biggest wind energy producer in the Baltics, depends on its wind turbines being highly reliable. ABB ACS800 converters are used in 24 wind turbines at its Aulepa and Aseri wind farms. With a total output of 72 megawatt (MW) and an average yearly capacity of 160 gigawatt-hours (GWh), these account for almost a quarter of Estonia's wind energy.
The company needed its ageing converters to continue operating at peak performance, but any maintenance had to be carried out in line with the operator’s existing scheduled maintenance program to minimize downtime. To achieve this, ABB reconditioned the old ACS800 converters in the existing wind turbine. The reconditioned equipment maximized reliability and performance for the turbines. It also avoided up to 79 percent emissions associated with buying brand-new equipment and extended the converters’ lifetime and warranty period.
Credit: ABB
Designing for circularity
It is often said that around 80 percent of a product’s environmental impact is determined at the design stage. To address this, we are investing R&D into “designing for circularity” - where equipment can be upgraded and retrofitted over its lifecycle, as opposed to being scrapped and replaced. This ensures that, as a society, we maximize the full use of resources.
At ABB, by 2030, we aim to have 80 percent of all of our products and solutions covered by our circularity approach and send zero waste from our own operations to landfill. There is ever-growing focus on the need for circularity and sustainability. Plant operators can play their part by improving the way they source and use equipment, and by extending the life of assets rather than buying new.
Read here for life-cycle services options for ABB’s ACS800 drives - https://explore.abb.com/acs800/