Power Companies Integrate Plant Control Systems with Business Applications

Lately in the power industry in India, information management is being used to attain better integration between plant control systems and business applications, enabling organizations to achieve better results. Companies like Reliance now have a centralized monitoring and an integrated visualization of plant processes in place. Information management in such a scenario includes automated and networked assets/processes - monitored via a centralized monitoring system, and information driven plant lifecycle management.

Reliance faced the challenge of maintaining sustained stable plant operations under demanding situations.  A number of issues such as the geographically dispersed nature of the company's plants across India, tight schedules for Greenfield projects, and the absence of proper communication channels- all made it difficult to capture data and share it over different networks.  The company also faced work force issues, including knowledge management (KM).

Establishing a Centralized Monitoring Station

To be able to access and analyze data from Reliance's current and planned fleet of power plants (constituting over 35,000 MW of generation capacity), the organization addressed the issues at hand by setting up a centralized monitoring station.

The monitoring center was set up with the objective of fleet wide monitoring, including early detection of operational and equipment problems, to mitigate damage and manage risk.

Reliance Power's centralized National Power Operations Center (NPOC) that connects the corporate office to all the power sites, adopted a number of systems and applications for optimizing plant operations. Drawing solutions from various suppliers, Reliance implemented systems such as OSI-PI and GE Proficy (now GE Historian)  historian for plant monitoring;  Honeywell's  alarm management system; GE SmartSignal predictive analytics software for conditioning monitoring and to avoid unexpected downtime; a remote vibration monitoring platform and DCS for data capture. Also with the aid of Schneider Electric's Availability Based Generation Management System (ABT) Reliance is able to manage the grid frequency efficiently.

Apart from these, the company is also in the process of installing an integrated visualization of generation information (IVGI) system.  This will link the energy management system, remote vibration monitoring systems, and smart signal predictive analysis application. Additionally, the company plans to implement a Performance Analysis, Diagnostic, and Optimization (PADO) tool in the near future. Moreover, power plants have to comply with about 3,500 legal and statutory regulations that entail the use of a compliance management system.

Integrated Visualization of Generation Information

An IVGI provides senior management an overview of historical, real-time, key performance indicators (KPI), quality, and contextual data captured on a single screen. Reliance managed to do this using GE RTIP with GE Proficy, and OSI-PI. The IGVI system projects the real-time production data of the various power stations simultaneously.

The IVGI dashboards consist of the generation status of each station updated daily, including a "flash report" capturing the previous day's data. These data represent a compilation of information from the plants, generation data, availability based tariff (ABT) data already shared with the distribution companies, and plant performance data. The system also has dashboards to monitor coal consumption at each unit and cost of coal pulled from SAP data from the mines. The ABT GMS guides the operator to change the fuel load depending on the grid frequency.  It also displays the results of operator actions in terms of money-saved-per-operator in real time. 

Ultimately, all the plant-specific process/equipment information, captured using advanced sensing technologies and converted into actionable information using Big Data approaches and advanced analytics, is displayed on management dashboards at Reliance Power's NPOC.

A word on Big Data; drawing on their experience users feel that Big Data makes sense only if equipment-specific software application is used; as in the case of rotating equipment or condition monitoring software specific to power plants; to derive meaningful information from it.

Keywords: Availability Based Generation Management System, Big Data, Centralized Monitoring, Control Systems, Predictive Analytics, Remote Monitoring