Power Generation

“There are probably less expensive solutions if you just want to store and manipulate data. But if you want to change your business—improve your business—OSIsoft’s solution is almost certainly the best. For us, start up costs have been reduced by about 30% and peak savings for one generating unit making 250 start-ups per annum were €120,000 in energy costs alone. And that does not include the money we save in minimizing damage to expensive equipment.”
Paul Ireland, Manager of Information Engineering, RWE npower Technology Services

Overview

OSIsoft's PI System is a critical foundation for successful implementation of power generation applications. The PI System is a flexible, powerful and continually growing family of applications and tools that gather, manipulate and make operational information readily available to everyone who needs it—in the proper context for each user and presented in an instantly understandable visual form.

PI System Solutions

The high performance capabilities of the PI System are of particular importance today as power and utilities executives struggle in an ever-changing market. Diverse generation assets, market regulation changes, increased fuel prices, and an onslaught of new environmental compliance mandates all contribute to new challenges. Add to that increases in mergers, acquisitions, company breakups, and divestitures and the situation becomes even more uncertain. Obstacles aside, companies are still faced with continuous growth in demand for power generation on top of coping with expectations to maintain reliable service, pay acceptable dividends, and find new ways to be profitable.

OSIsoft provides the only real-time platform that can scale across the enterprise and meet the information needs of globally competitive companies. OSIsoft offers an enterprise solution for:

• Enterprise energy management—efficiency improvement and performance benchmarking
• Enterprise carbon accounting—calculate and monitor the physical carbon position for global companies to manage their greenhouse gas exposure
• Enterprise asset optimization—calculate and monitor the enterprise asset performance and cost structure.

Benefits

Power companies are meeting these challenges by using the PI System to collect, analyze, and share real-time and historical information from all parts of their operations — including various types of generation and energy control centers as well as customer usage patterns. For instance, companies use the PI System to increase reliability, availability, and capacity through advanced asset management practices such as Condition Based Maintenance. Additional operational efficiencies are realized through improved planning and forecasting, asset optimization, and environmental compliance. While fuel prices continue to provide logistical challenges, many OSIsoft customers are reducing their fuel costs by optimizing asset startups and are even realizing greater value through dispatching practices that identify the most economically beneficial decisions.