Largest Power Plant Monitoring Center to Use GE Digital’s APM Software 

SAN RAMON, Calif., Oct. 3, 2017 -- GE Digital (NYSE: GE) announced that GE Power’s Monitoring & Diagnostics Center in Atlanta will now utilize the company’s Predix-based, Asset Performance Management (APM) software to monitor the assets for power producers and utility customers around the world. The center is the world’s largest power monitoring facility, tracking the asset health of more than 500 power plants internationally. With GE Digital’s APM suite, the center will help keep the lights on around the world by increasing the reliability of thousands of turbines and generators.

Globally, more than one billion people suffer from an unreliable electricity supply. According to the World Bank, unplanned power outages leave homes and businesses in many emerging countries without electricity for 15 or more days per month. Even in the United States, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) reports that the average power system suffers downtime and is unable to meet demand six percent of the time.

“Data science plays a critical role in improving the reliability of the electricity supply to consumers,” said Russell Stokes, CEO of GE Power. “With GE Digital’s Predix-based, Asset Performance Management software, the M&D Center in Atlanta will enhance its ability to forecast and prevent power outages worldwide.”

Large-scale Industrial IoT implementation will help make power outages a thing of the past

More than 500 power producers and utilities globally use the Atlanta M&D Center’s expert data scientists and monitoring services to identify machine and equipment issues. Every day the center monitors more than 12 billion data points detailing the health of assets in the field – coming from one million sensors attached to 5,000 devices in over 500 power plants across the world.

However, experts largely rely on email or phone calls to alert customers to potential outages. With today’s announcement, the center’s customers - who choose the new APM-based services offered as an upgrade option - will gain a real-time view of Center data, enabling more effective, collaborative trouble-shooting with experts and enhancing the ability to forecast and prevent power outages.

“GE Digital developed its APM analytics by analyzing more than 125 million hours of data from generators and turbines, said Bill Ruh, CEO of GE Digital. “These analytics provide GE Digital with the unique ability to reduce unplanned downtime by up to five percent, reduce false alarms by up to 75 percent, and reduce operations and maintenance costs by up to 25 percent. Applied globally, this technology has the potential to transform lives, businesses and economies.”

The APM solution, powered by Predix, GE Digital’s platform for the Industrial Internet, uses proven predictive analytics and intelligent asset strategies. APM allows asset-centric industrial companies to increase asset reliability and availability while reducing costs and managing risk in operations. In addition, companies can reduce inventory costs by analyzing and determining spare parts requirements based upon failure rates, logistical constraints, and downtime/consequence costs.

Typically, plant operators who run traditional monitoring capabilities only have minutes or hours of advanced notice on any critical machine issues. Center customers who deploy the Predix-based APM software will gain several weeks advance notice. If you can plan your asset downtime, as opposed to reacting to what could be a major issue, you preserve productivity and reduce costs.

M&D-as-a-Service

While most of the world’s power producers and utilities do not run sophisticated monitoring and diagnostics centers of their own, a subset does run remote and on-site centers. To enable utilities with their own centers to gain the benefits offered directly by APM, GE Digital today unveiled a new M&D-as-a-Service offering. The service helps customers implement APM across their power generation fleets, connects those assets to a centralized monitoring location, and provides services to support the design, build and management of operations centers.

About GE Digital

GE Digital is a leading software company for the Industrial Internet, reimagining industry's infrastructure by connecting software, apps and analytics to industrial businesses to drive a Predix-powered world. GE Digital creates software to design, build, operate and manage the entire asset lifecycle – enabling industrial businesses to operate faster, smarter and more efficiently. For more information, visit www.ge.com/digital.

GE Digital Power offers a full Digital Utility software suite to the energy industry that connects everything from assets to operations and business level functions for more profitable energy businesses. The Digital Utility software suite includes the APM application, GE’s Operations Optimization and Business Optimization applications, and Digital Worker solutions delivered via ServiceMax from GE Digital.

Source: GE Digital