When it comes to getting paid for methane biofuels credits, the proof is in the flow meters. Well, as long as you can get the flow meter data to the historian for reporting. It’s one thing run your plant reliable but when you can’t prove it, is when it’s a problem for biofuels credits. One of our biofuels customers was having trouble with their internet connections at several remote sites. It was found out the hard way that the SCADA clients were failing to store and forward the historical data to the cloud historian when the internet was restored. This happened not only when the internet went down but also data was lost when the HMI was rebooted as it is also the historian gateway. The SCADA vendor was unable to recover the data and the customer lost months of flow meter data.
To get paid for methane credits producers must provide the flow meter data that proves methane was either destroyed by a flare or put into a pipeline. The government will not average missing flow meter data, so the producer loses out on the government credits. It was this situation that caused Helle Engineering to jump into action and engineer a solution. We designed small micro historians to independently collect data and a client application to search & backfill the missing data in the plant historian. With our system we can store up to 500 tags for six months and can talk to many different PLC controllers. All our micro historian installations are based on redundant micro historian pairs and installed with our UPS panels. This ensures that our micro historian systems can continue to collect data when the plant has lost power and the process is sent to the flare.
In summary, think of our micro historians as an insurance policy that will pay for itself when you need it. Imagine your plant historian server has crashed and you are unable to extract your flow meter data for monthly reporting. Without proof there are no payments for methane credits. Our micro historian client works with PI and Aveva Insight. The data can be exported to excel or imported into the historian directly. We have designed our micro historian system to ensure that your flow meter data is secure and accessible.