DST Controls’ Alternative Energy Initiative

Since DST’s founding in 1975 as a controls systems integration company, Energy Conservation and CleanTech have gone from fringe-interest to mainstream-urgency. Gas guzzling two-ton muscle cars of the 1960’s and ‘70’s have given way to composite-bodied hybrids, tipping in at barely more than a half ton; children now regularly chide their parents for leaving the lights on in empty rooms; and more and more "normal" people are now even unplugging their appliances at night to eliminate LED status indicator "vampire drain."

Yet despite the lack of green-demand "back in the day," DST was even then regularly involved in assisting its customers in cutting energy costs and protecting the environment. On the "facilities side," such projects included monitoring lighting systems, monitoring load-shedding, resource-efficient effluent neutralization; and early forms of HVAC optimization. On the process side, one of our earliest energy-focused projects involved using PLCs (a new product at the time!) in a chocolate manufacturing plant. This, to operate tank agitators only when the thickening chocolate threatened to solidify—instead of running full time as before, using 3X the energy actually needed.

Fast forward to 2010 and DST’s "energy offers" now also include...

• UL and CE-compliant "standard" & "smart" combiner box, and re-combiner box, design and/or manufacturing for the solar industry
• Plant infrastructure, process, and equipment monitoring for energy management systems (EMS) and conditions-based-maintenance (CBM)
• Control and Monitoring product design, engineering, and manufacturing

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