Instrumentation & Controls

It seems as if each week brings further bad news for coal power plants. Recently, Consumer’s Energy sought relief to close three power plants, South Carolina Electric & Gas announced it would cease

In an email interview with POWER, Xue Wei, manager for Emerson Process Management Power & Water Solutions, China Business Development, provided some insight into the current state of control systems for Chinese power plants. His responses, edited for style, follow. POWER: How widespread are “state-of-the-art” control systems (yours and others) in new generating plants in […]

Training simulators are worth their weight in gold to the power industry, as well as to most process industries in general. People tend to learn the fastest and the most thoroughly when hands-on trial and

Aging human machine interface (HMI) hardware will eventually become a burden on plant operation. Obsolete HMIs can cause problems with connectivity, historical data loss, and hardware failure. As the hardware

Cybersecurity awareness and best practices are increasingly central to the power generation, transmission, and distribution industry. Industrial cybersecurity concerns, recently heightened by awareness of how

Perhaps because the public has been more obsessed in recent years by cybersecurity breaches involving everything from social media accounts to classified military secrets, the amount of attention given to the

A recently published standard has been adopted globally to address risks arising from the use of business information technology (IT) cybersecurity solutions to address industrial automation and control systems (IACS) cybersecurity in complex and dangerous manufacturing and processing applications. The ISA-62443 series of standards, being developed by the ISA99 committee of the International Society of […]

There are many reasons to anticipate that the use of wireless instrumentation in industrial settings will increase dramatically in the next few years.

What if you could send a control message between two points on the electricity grid—say between a control room operator and a turbine or between a system operator and a generating plant—and know that there’s no way that message can be intercepted, altered, or spoofed to effect malicious ends? That possibility may be only a couple of years away.

Only through proper troubleshooting and then solving the underlying problems can control loop performance be improved. Process design certainly plays a role in control loop performance, but experience has shown that the majority of control loops can perform better—provided that the root cause of the poor performance is found and corrected.

Panelists at a House hearing on Tuesday held to examine steps the federal government and private sector are taking to bolster the nation’s critical infrastructure security shed light on the extent and variety of possible cyberattacks and called for flexible solutions. The hearing was held days after the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released its initial analysis of hundreds of comments submitted in response to President Obama’s February 2013 cybersecurity executive order.

A software algorithm developed by researchers from North Carolina State University promises to detect and isolate cyber attacks on networked control systems.

Mexico’s Federal Electrical Commission needed a safe way to train new operators at its Laguna Verde Nuclear Power Plant in Veracruz, so it developed a stand-alone process simulator that allows trainees to practice a wide variety of plant operations and responses to incidents without putting the plant itself at risk.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) may be the most important federal agency many in the power industry have never heard of. Whatever generation technology you are associated with, ARPA-E’s work will affect its future.

Progress in electronics and information technology has created incentives to replace traditional analog instrumentation and control (I&C) systems in nuclear power plants with digital I&C systems, or systems based on computers and microprocessors. About 40% of the world’s operating reactors have been modernized to include at least some digital I&C systems, according to the International […]

Accurate knowledge of the water level in any boiler drum application is an absolute necessity. While operating a boiler with low water level is one of the leading causes of boiler failure, operating with a high water level may produce less-than-optimal steam, as well as damage to the steam turbine by moisture carryover.

Many recent utility greenfield and rehabilitation power projects have incorporated plant automation, with the goal of reducing the number of operators needed. The essential design principle is to specify control systems and field devices that will achieve the desired operational regime. Here’s how it’s done “Down Under.”

The increased use of intermittent renewable energy sources and the shift to gas-fired combustion turbines places new burdens on the dispatch of many coal-fired units. Steam units must now operate at very low minimum load while maintaining the ability to ramp up and down quickly. High-pressure feedwater heater energy control can improve the system response of such coal-fired units.

Mismatched or poorly maintained temperature sensors and thermowells can cause an often-unrecognized error in steam temperature measurement. The problem is often recognized only when sluggish steam temperature response times are noticed. Recent tests suggest some simple ways to resolve the problem.

Many power plants have sediment retention ponds that require control of pH for the effluent. The following guidelines for fossil plant sediment pond pH control will help you design a robust system while staying within budget.

A report by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergence Response Team (ICS-CERT) reveals that infected USB drives spread common and sophisticated malware in the control systems at two power plants in separate incidents late last year.

Solar flares have proven destructive effects on transmission grids, but there are many other “black swan events” that threaten modern civilization. Experts disagree about which protective steps should be taken today.

Despite growing concern about cybersecurity both in and outside of Washington, the Senate’s cybersecurity bill died a second time on Nov. 13. The apparent inability of Congress to pass legislation designed to protect critical U.S. infrastructure could lead to President Barack Obama implementing some of the bill’s provisions via executive order. A day after the bill failed to gain 60 votes for passage, a recently declassified report was released that finds the U.S. power grid is vulnerable to attacks that could be more destructive than natural disasters such as Hurricane Sandy.

With license extensions for its three units in hand, Duke Energy’s Oconee Nuclear Station began a digital controls upgrade program in 2006, and in January 2010, AREVA became the first supplier to receive Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval for a safety-related digital instrumentation and controls system.

Cyber attacks on the utility industry are no longer theoretical. According to multiple sources, smart grid technology vendor Telvent told U.S., Canadian, and Spanish customers on Sept. 10 that hackers had broken through its firewall and accessed “project files” related to its OASyS SCADA system. On Wednesday, reports surfaced that, based on the perpetrators’ “digital fingerprints,” the attack appears to be the work of a well-known Chinese hacker group.

Siemens Infrastructure & Cities and Munich city utility Stadtwerke München (SWM) this April put into operation a virtual power plant (VPP), linking several small-scale distributed energy sources and pooling their resources so they can be operated as a single installation (Figure 1). The project comes on the heels of a February 2012 expansion of a […]

Industrial control systems (ICSs) manage global industrial infrastructures, including electric power systems, by measuring, controlling, and providing a view of control processes that once were visible to the operator but now are not. Frequently, ICSs are not viewed as computers that must operate in a secure environment, nor are they often considered susceptible to cybersecurity threats. However, recent cybersecurity failures have proven these assumptions wrong.

The cybersecurity needs of the electric power industry are unique, due to the critical nature of the product and the wide range of technologies that must be considered—from complex, modern industrial control systems to aging infrastructure elements.

Most power plants use some form of condenser performance-monitoring protocol. Some of those protocols are deficient because the proper instrumentation is not installed to collect the necessary data. Three case studies illustrate how collecting good condenser performance data enabled plant staff to troubleshoot problems and make good plant performance improvement decisions.

Lakeland Electric’s C.D. McIntosh, Jr. Power Plant is a microcosm of the entire power generation industry. On a single site is a once-baseload coal-fired plant that is now operating fewer hours plus a peaking gas-fired combined cycle plant that has swung to baseload operation. A complete controls upgrade of the gas-fired plant last year prepared the plant for its expanded role in producing electricity for this 108-year-old public power provider.