More than a decade ago,
POWER published a landmark special report, “Information Technology for Powerplant Management,” that documented how plants were beginning to use powerful software applications to improve their performance and economics. At the time, the phrase “islands of automation” was popular. It described how each function—process optimization, computerized maintenance management, performance monitoring, and distributed control system—seemed isolated from the others. The report also suggested that, “today the objective is to integrate IT components into an information engine.”
Ten years later, is the industry meeting that goal?
Original research conducted by the author’s firm for multiple clients over the past few months now offers at least a partial answer. The “islands” are indeed moving closer together, and some are even adjacent. But at most plants, they still work independently, rather than as an integrated knowledge management system.
Pearl Street believes its research is groundbreaking because
- It focuses only on power generation facilities,
- Software suppliers rarely monitor how their products perform after their implementation team leaves the customer’s site, and
- Software performance is usually reported piecemeal, plant by plant, and not as industry trends.
As always, we encourage readers to participate in the debate.
Pervasive, but still piecemeal
To give you an idea of which applications are involved, let’s characterize a typical diagnostics and monitoring center for a fleet of plants that all use the same distributed control system (DCS). Following is a list of the center’s systems and functions:
- A plant data repository and historian
- A corporate, business-level system
- An interface between the corporate and plant systems
- Process diagnostic and predictive analytic packages
- Thermal performance (heat rate) monitoring
- Tracking of fuel variables, including cost
- A process-optimizing neural network
- Work, task, and maintenance management
- Tracking of the capacity and availability history of units, with an interface to the independent system operator that dispatches them
- Control of NOx emissions
- Electronic notification and alerts
Most plants that responded to our requests for information said they deploy some or most of these applications in some form, although with different overall strategies. For example, one fleet describes its data management strategy as equipment-centric. Some owner/operators outsource plant monitoring to a third party. There’s also variety in how integrated plant software is with its owner’s corporate business system.
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