Le Riseria is expanding its production facilities in Ticino, Switzerland. This company, owned by Migros, Switzerland’s largest retail company, is pursuing a comprehensive sustainability program. La Riseria relies on ABB’s digitally monitored low-voltage distribution system, a first for Switzerland.
In Switzerland, rice consumption is growing every year, currently at around six kilograms per person, per year. Thirty years ago, only a quarter of today’s volume of rice was imported into Switzerland.
A considerable part of that imported rice – around 15,000 tons per year – is processed in the largest Swiss rice mill: La Riseria in Taverne, which now forms part of M-Industrie.
Digital Innovation
In its commitment to sustainability, M-Industrie set ambitious targets for 2020 with further visions for 2040. One of the ten areas of action is resource efficiency. The key point here is to improve energy efficiency.
In the course of this commitment to sustainability, La Riseria has decided to rely on the digitally supervised low-voltage distribution solution ABB Ability™ Electrical Distribution Control System (EDCS). This forms an integral part of its planned renovations and expansion of the rice mill, the first installation of this digital innovation by ABB, in Switzerland.
EDCS is a cloud-based software solution that records, analyses and optimises energy flow within the energy supply system. Plant operators can retrieve data anytime, anywhere, via smartphone, tablet or PC.
Precise Monitoring
“Originally, we were looking for a conventional low-voltage distribution system for the new production plant,” explains Roberto Galati, sales engineer of ABB Switzerland in Ticino. “However, in the first conversation, executives of La Riseria were very interested in this digital solution in order to comprehensively monitor energy consumption, even though it had not yet been installed anywhere else in Switzerland.
The ABB Ability™ EDCS is not only able to monitor consumption at the main power distribution system switches, but in combination with ABB’s circuit monitoring system CMS-700, it is also able to track consumption right down to the lowest consumption branch of the electrical system, such as the building’s lighting.
La Riseria decided to take advantage of both and entrusted Quadranti Bruno e Figlio SA to install ABB Ability™ EDCS for both production and the overall building infrastructure. This family business in Ticino is a switchgear manufacturer that usually relies on low-voltage products from ABB for its projects.
ABB Ability™ EDCS was new territory for Quadranti, a switchgear manufacturer, who are not necessarily a specialist in software protocols and firewalls. To connect the low-voltage distribution to EDCS, there are two options: an integrated plug & play solution via the Ekip Com Hub plug-in module for the Emax 2 central circuit breaker or an external solution via the Ekip E-Hub mounted on an A4 rail. This collects all the data of the system and transmits it to the cloud. La Riseria preferred the integrated solution and with some support from ABB, Quadranti ultimately implemented it without any problems.
In Operation since Summer 2018 
Two low-voltage distribution boards were installed and commissioned in summer 2018 and use the CMS-700 circuit monitoring control units and sensors.
The rice mill was expanded and underwent renovations in 2019. Currently, the two new low-voltage distributions supply the existing installations.
