KBR: Energy meters, power factor correction and energy data software for industry

Overview

KBR began in 1976 as a craft business building reactive power compensation systems, and its name still comes from that work: the company page traces the letters to Kompensationsanlagen-Bau-Rednitzhembach, after Rednitzhembach, the municipality next to Schwabach, and now reads them as Kompensations-Blindleistungs-Regelanlagenbau. It has since moved to Schwabach and, in 2024, changed its legal name from KBR Kompensationsanlagenbau GmbH to KBR EnergyManagement GmbH to match a range that had grown well beyond capacitor banks. It is a different company from KBR, Inc., the American engineering group.

What sets KBR apart from most meter makers is that it sells the whole chain from one factory. The same company makes the multimess meters and Class A power quality analysers, the multicab compensation cabinets and multiwave harmonic filters that act on what those meters find, the multimax controller that sheds load to hold a demand target, and the visual energy software that turns the readings into ISO 50001 reports. Its home page calls this 360 degree energy management, and an interview with FineEngineering in 2023 described customers from small bakeries to large international groups.

The business is family-owned and run by the third generation. Development, assembly and testing happen in Schwabach, a field service team works across Germany, and seminars on operational energy management are part of the offer. The meters themselves are capable instruments, but they are designed first for KBR's own eBus and software, which shapes how they fit into other systems.

Offering

KBR groups its range as measure, manage and optimise on its home page.

Measure

The energy meters page lists the multimess family: the F96-TFT 96 mm panel analyser in seven device types and a Rogowski retrofit version, the F144-LED, the D6 and D4 DIN-rail meters, and two Class A power quality analysers, the F144-PQ and the D9-PQ. The multicount D5 is the MID-certified billing meter, in direct 75 A and transformer versions. Around them sit multisys gateways, repeaters and pulse doublers, multict current transformers and multisio input modules for digital, analogue, current and temperature signals.

Manage

visual energy 5 is KBR's energy data management software, with dashboards, significant energy use key figures, peak-load and EN 50160 reports, heatmaps and Sankey diagrams, an Excel add-in and a mobile app for manual readings. On premises it is a one-off licence plus metering point licences, with three maintenance contracts on offer, and the EDM page says KBR helps with German BAFA funding applications. The multimax D6 controls peak demand over the 15-minute period, and the multisio IGW brings charging stations and battery storage into that control.

Optimise

The multicab-R compensation systems come as floor cabinets, wall housings and mounting plates, up to 500 kvar for the multicab-R-E, with a thyristor-switched model and detuned versions of all of them; secureC is a separate safety and maintenance module. The multiwave range covers active, passive and high-frequency harmonic filters. Power quality services, maintenance and spare components complete the offer.

Technology

The common thread in KBR hardware is the KBR eBus, a proprietary RS-485 and TCP protocol that links meters, controllers and the software. Modbus is available, but by device type rather than across the range. The multimess F96-TFT manual (version 5.00) shows the pattern: the MS and ESMS types carry an RS-485 port that speaks Modbus RTU or ASCII once the bus protocol is switched from eBus in the setup menu, the MT type has Ethernet with Modbus TCP, the ET and ESET-GW types speak only eBus, and the base type has no interface. The data point table in chapter 10 lists every value as a 32-bit IEEE 754 float read with function 04, with the request address set one below the table address. The RS-485 port runs at up to 19,200 baud with up to 32 devices on a segment, and the TCP module is configured over Telnet on port 9999.

The F96-TFT product page gives measurement to DIN EN 61557-12, voltage monitoring to EN 61000-4-30, harmonics to the 63rd, 15-minute load profiles and a 366-day ring memory of daily energy. The F144-PQ is a Class A analyser to IEC 61000-4-30 Edition 3, sampling at 40.96 kHz, with harmonics to the 50th (to the 400th as an option), 1 GB of memory and Modbus RTU or TCP over RS-485 and Ethernet. The D9-PQ brings the same class to the DIN rail with an SD card of up to 32 GB and a class F2 flicker meter. The multicount D5 is MID certified under modules B and D in accuracy class B, but its serial interface is eBus only.

visual energy 5 runs on the customer's own server, on a pre-configured KBR 19-inch rack server, or in secureCloud, hosted in certified German data centres and reached over a VPN. It reads OPC for live values and meter readings, imports CSV, MSCONS and EDIFACT files with OBIS identifiers, and exports to higher-level systems. KBR describes it as TÜV-certified and ISO 50001-compliant.

Customers

KBR's reference page names 40 customers, almost all in Germany and grouped by industry: automotive, building materials, clinics and chemicals, utilities and municipalities, logistics, food and drink, metal and electrical, and consumer goods. Most are visual energy installations; a smaller group bought compensation systems, filters or multimax peak-load control.

The longest-documented project is ZF Friedrichshafen's plant in Passau. It installed its first two or three multimess meters in 1999 and grew to about 640 meters covering electricity, water, compressed air and process media, all read into visual energy. When ZF declared 2010 its year of energy, the plant set a target of 20% lower energy consumption relative to value added and, by KBR's account, reached it within five years, with lower weekend consumption and better grid quality along the way.

The Simba Dickie Group used KBR for a different problem: recurring IT disruptions and unexplained printer failures at its Fürth headquarters. KBR fitted a Class A network analyser in the main low-voltage distribution, fed its data into the existing energy management system and trained staff to use it, so that supply disturbances are now recorded and can be matched against faults.

The reference page also gives scale for other users without case studies: the Mubea Group runs a KBR system at 43 locations in 15 countries, Dachser uses visual energy across its European branches with more than 2,000 metering points and about 100 users, and DB Fernverkehr bought active filters and compensation systems. Utilities such as TEAG and Energieversorgung Leverkusen use the software and KBR's cloud to give their own business customers energy data.

Markets

KBR's market is industrial and commercial electricity users, mainly in Germany. Its customers buy to cut reactive power charges and demand peaks, to meet ISO 50001, and to qualify for BAFA funding of metering technology and software, which the EDM page puts at up to 45 percent. The reference list adds utilities and municipalities that resell energy data to their own customers.

Outside Germany the evidence is thinner. Bavaria's state trade agency lists Austria, China, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Ghana, Greece, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, Poland, Serbia, Switzerland and Taiwan among its sales target countries. The company speaks of a worldwide partner network but publishes no distributor list, and its field service, seminars and secureCloud hosting are all German.

KBR is a regular at the trade fairs and associations of its home industry. It presented visual energy and its compensation range at Hannover Messe 2026, is a member of the electrical industry association ZVEI, and joined the surface technology association ZVO as a sponsoring member in May 2023. It also contributed to the ZVEI capacitor group's 2013 study of industrial reactive power compensation for the German grid, alongside Epcos, Frako, Schneider Electric and Maschinenfabrik Reinhausen.

Company

KBR EnergyManagement GmbH is registered at the Nuremberg local court under HRB 2857, at Am Kiefernschlag 7 in Schwabach, south of Nuremberg, according to its imprint. Achim Tempelmeier, Simon Tempelmeier and Jessica Schildbach are its managing directors. Achim Tempelmeier, a graduate engineer, was the company's sole listed manager in Bavaria's company database and represented KBR on the 2013 ZVEI compensation study.

The company dates itself to 1976 and calls itself a third-generation family business on its company page, which also records the 2024 change of name from KBR Kompensationsanlagenbau GmbH. It does not publish turnover or headcount. In March 2023 its marketing manager told FineEngineering that KBR had more than 120 employees and was still growing, while the Bavarian database gives 89 employees at the Schwabach site and annual turnover of €5 million to under €10 million; neither figure is dated by its source.

KBR states TÜV certification to ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO 50001 on its certificates page, along with RoHS and REACH compliance checked through suppliers, a supplier sustainability profile on IntegrityNext, and a PV system with battery storage at its own site controlled by multimax. Its company page adds the BSFZ seal of the German research allowance office for in-house research and development. The ZVO announcement of 2023 credited it with more than 1,000 active energy data management projects and over 25 years of collecting and processing energy data.