Pearl Bioénergie France operates several biomass cogeneration (CHP) plants that supply low-carbon electricity and steam to industrial customers. To monitor them in real time, the company brought data from every system that runs its plants into a single tool. The result: the group has a continuous view of the technical and economic performance of all its sites, and teams spot opportunities to produce more and better, faster.
Pearl Bioénergie France owns and operates biomass cogeneration plants. Its core business is producing green, low-carbon energy, as electricity and steam, for industrial customers. The company has several similar plants in France.
The Novillars site, near Besançon in eastern France (Doubs), is a good example of this model. It generates up to 20 MW of electricity, fed into the RTE public transmission grid. It also supplies steam to a neighboring manufacturer that makes cardboard sheets for packaging.
The fuel is wood from local forestry, a major industry in the Franche-Comté region. Logs are chipped and automatically fed into the boiler. The boiler produces steam at 520 °C and 120 bar, which drives a turbine to generate electricity. Part of that steam then goes to the manufacturer for its packaging paper process.
For a cogeneration plant, data is not a side issue. It is used to monitor how the plant is running, and also to bill customers.
“We bill our customers for energy, with steam on one side and electrons on the other. All the billing and all the financial tracking are done with meters and IT data.” (translated from French) — Philippe Pascal, President, Pearl Bioénergie France
A site of this size generates a very large amount of information. But it comes from the different systems needed to run the plant day to day: the control system (chipper, boiler, turbine, water treatment and other auxiliary systems), weighing and quality analyses of wood deliveries, maintenance, events logged by operators… Getting a piece of information, building a new KPI or comparing different operating periods meant a lot of manual work.
Pearl Bioénergie France therefore launched a data monitoring project with a clear goal: a single tool that collects all data whatever its source, enables real-time monitoring and control of the plant, and is accessible at every level of the organization, from anywhere.
With digitalization, Pearl Bioénergie France now has a centralized data management tool. All information can be analyzed at any time step. Thanks to the contextualization engine, which aggregates and transforms data, it is easy to create economic or technical KPIs, put them under control and track them.
The solution’s calculation capabilities also enable detailed technical monitoring of assets: thermal performance, using the thermodynamic formulas built into the contextualization engine, and a digital twin, through Python code execution.
Teams get information instantly and can react very quickly. The gains are twofold:
“It lets us produce more and better at the same time.” (translated from French) — Santino Redaelli, Novillars Site Director, Pearl Bioénergie France
Because the tool is already deployed at other sites, the benefits seen at one site help the others: lessons learned are shared across plants.
“We are very satisfied: every day, around 10 a.m., we have the previous day’s production results for all our sites.” (translated from French) — Philippe Pascal
Today, assets are monitored continuously. Whether on site or at group headquarters, data is available instantly. As a result, management has a consolidated view of production across all plants.
“We feel much more at ease when we see that all the indicators are green across our plants, thanks to the system we put in place.” (translated from French) — Philippe Pascal
For Pearl Bioénergie France, centralizing data has changed the way it runs its biomass plants. A single tool, accessible from anywhere, replaces manual data collection. It provides a continuous view of production at every site and helps produce more while protecting equipment.
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