In most industrial plants, the most significant risk to uptime isn’t just what you don’t know. It’s what one system knows that another can’t see. When a substation trips and the fault never reaches the operator’s console, what should’ve been a 10-minute reset can become a 10-day mystery. That’s not just inefficiency, it’s likely a design flaw. One born from two worlds that were never meant to talk to each other. This is why it’s time to redefine how plants manage power and process control.
Beyond classical “uptime” however, now more than ever is the requirement to inject customer energy constraints into the operation of the process. Energy and resource constraints can now be modulated within certain ranges by electricity providers and national grid systems, now depending on industrial plants to play a new role in energy supply and demand.
Historically, these two domains operated in parallel, separated by technical complexity, response times, and siloed engineering workflows. But as industries transition toward electrification, renewable energy integration, and enhanced operational efficiency, a seamless, interdependent connection between electrical and process systems is a key operational priority.
Substation integration: Where friction becomes failure
The challenge lies in substation integration, a traditionally cumbersome and under-optimized domain:
- Process control is continuous, adjusting setpoints every second to maintain stability and throughput.
- Substation automation is event-driven, reacting in milliseconds to protect electrical assets from failure.
These fundamentally different timeframes and philosophies make true coordination difficult. It’s a divergence that creates friction. Hardwired interfaces between distributed control systems (DCS) and electrical management control systems (EMCS) are common, but they can be increasingly inadequate.
Marshaling cabinets, excessive cabling, and static logic can’t keep pace with modern demands. Most critically, they limit visibility. One of our customers reported that diagnosing a substation fault could sometimes take weeks, simply because the alarm never entered the DCS.
Electrification and renewables: Turning up the pressure
Now, add in electrification. Industries replacing gas-fired equipment with electric heaters or high-horsepower motors place more demand on their power systems than ever before. Meanwhile, renewable energy introduces volatility—solar and wind power fluctuate, sometimes within seconds and the grid providers must in turn place constraints on the plant production.
A good example of this type of operation is when plants are motivated or regulated to use renewable energy, and where that same energy is immediately expended in say electrolysers (e.g., gH2 plants).
Without a control system that understands both the process and the power side, operators can’t predict where constraints will appear or how to respond. Consider a refinery moving from gas combustion to electric heating: suddenly, the DCS isn’t just modulating valves. It’s managing megawatt-scale loads, and it needs to know what the electrical network can support right now.
When these systems are disconnected, the result is over-engineering, wasted capacity, and risk. But when they’re integrated, everything changes.
Dual citizenship for a new class of control
The key isn’t to force one system into the other’s mold. Rather, it’s to design a controller that holds dual citizenship—fully capable in the power domain and process automation.
That’s the principle behind the EcoStruxureTM Electrodynamic Controller, engineered to unify electrical substations and process control systems without forcing either to compromise. When paired with Foxboro DCS, it enables seamless coordination between electrical and process domains. It leverages IEC 61850 for electrical integration, alongside real-time protocols like MMS and GOOSE for high-speed control messaging. This enables:
- Real-time constraint sharing: The DCS can now respond dynamically to power availability, reducing the risk of tripping or overload.
- Unified alarms and event management: Electrical system faults appear in the operator’s alarm interface, enabling fast diagnosis and resolution.
- Cybersecure architecture: With IEC 62443-compliant design and separate network paths, integration doesn’t compromise security.
- Load demand controls: when external energy providers, become the customers, their customer constraints turn into load demand controls – where loading is the plant itself.
Recently, one of our customers was under pressure to reduce their reliance on gas. Then they had a lightbulb moment. They electrified a core process and used a unified control architecture to dynamically modulate its energy consumption based on grid conditions. This capability isn’t possible with legacy, hardwired systems.
From visibility to intelligence
This convergence is all about efficiency, yes. But it’s also about resilience.
Once data is unified and contextualized, the next step is intelligence. Predictive energy management systems can forecast drops in renewable generation and adjust process loads pre-emptively. A water treatment plant may reschedule pumping cycles to coincide with peak wind output. A mine might ramp energy-intensive processes during high solar availability.
In other words, what begins as visibility becomes foresight. And what once required overbuilt infrastructure becomes a software-defined system: adaptive, transparent, and sustainable.
So, who owns it now?
This is where we see the real shift. When electrical and process systems merge, responsibilities evolve as well. Energy becomes a process variable. Load management becomes a control strategy. And the long-standing boundaries between domains begin to dissolve.
This brings us back to the controller itself. The EcoStruxure Electrodynamic Controller is a smart node with dual allegiance to power and to process. Engineered for modular deployment, built to run natively in both environments, and secure enough to bridge formerly incompatible networks, it enables true convergence.
The plants of the future won’t be defined by how much power they consume, but by how intelligently they use it.
Discover more about the EcoStruxure Power and Process Control System, and see how this integrated architecture can reduce CAPEX by up to 20 percent and unplanned downtime by 15 percent.
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