Big Data has big potential for power operators, says ABB

Plant operators will need to build a digital twin for their physical infrastructure.

Since launching its software control system Symphony Plus in 2011 ABB has been controlling more than 50 GW of additional power and for the last four years has been the world’s number one in plant automation. That gives the firm a unique position to speak on big data and managing power plants, a trend the company says is only increasing as the world moves to digital and the internet of things.

"Imagine a situation where a power plant has 1,000 different alarms and many start going off at once,” said ABB vice president Marco Sanguineti. “How does the operator prioritise what to look at and where the problem is?” The answer is big data which can not only collect and store data but give intelligent answers to the people who need them when they need them. That is the vision of ABB for big data in power plants.

Like Arnold Schwarenegger in the classic film The Terminator, Sanguineti says plant operators will need to build a digital twin for their physical infrastructure. “A cyber physical system means I need to build a digital twin of my physical infrastructure. We all know with everything so interconnected what happens if someone changes a setting. So security is paramount. With collaborative tools we can have a new workforce to go around and measure things like vibration and with a phone you can understand how the equipment is behaving. This is changing the way our workforce needs to work. Then we have smarter instruments and better diagnostics. The problem is not how to store data, but how to get the right information and how to sort out what is important out of the big number of data,” he said.

One misconception some people have is that everything can be done on the cloud, but this is not the case, said Sanguineti. “ A lot of people think that with cloud the power plant won’t need a control centre but this is not true. What is changing is that operators will get more aggregated data. The other benefit is that what was a huge process to build a plant is become easier because with the collaboration tools we can have a faster plant handover.”

“We believe the success of our power generation customers will be more and more supported by the intelligent use of data generated by ever increasing connectivity of devices. The integration of those data with people expertise and knowledge will create additional services (IoTSP) in a cycle delivering unprecedented knowledge of the behavior and potential of their assets,” he added.

ABB vice president Manjay Khazanchi noted that over the next two decades, Asia will account for three-quarter of projected global energy demand, driven by rapid industrialization, population growth and urbanization. “While the world is moving away from coal, Asia’s dependence on it is becoming inevitable,” Khazanchi said. “Even so, the deployment of clean coal technology will represent more than half of total installed capacity, ensuring higher efficiency and lower emissions from coal generation.”

One key point about ABB Symphony was its scale with many people not realizing the firm also handles very small power plants. “We operate from the smallest plant sizes like a 14MW biomass greenfield site in Indonesia to a 5,800 MW plant retrofit in Korea,” Khazanchi said. “When you are talking about big data it’s important to understand how the data is captured, stored and reproduced in an intelligent matter. So this really shows that the software in Symphony plus is scalable, and it is secure. The most important challenge is on security and of course people try to be the most secure and we are spending a lot of money on R&D to ensure our systems remain safe and that’s our number one priority,” he added.

One important thing with data at a plant level is that it comes out from the control room and it all has to be handled in a manner where the operators can judge and take actions in an appropriate manner without los of data and production, said Khazanchi. “We have seen cases in power plants where a trip has produced so much data people can’t decide what to do with it. We have also seen cases where they can’t pin point what the cause of the problem was because of insufficuent data or it was not time stamped. Without having proper infrastructure at the root level big data is useless,” he said. Khazanchi added that in a recent retrofit of the 5,800 MW Boryeoung plant in Korea the firm was able to do the retrofit in just 60 days because of all the data it was able toanalyse before starting the upgrade. “

Sanguineti, who is known as the grandfather of the ABB Symphony platform, said the move to a data driven plant is critical.“Symphony Plus with all these elements its clear that things are getting more digital . The dream of each man is the eternal – to be alive forever, which means that since our bodies are getting older you transfer the soul. So with Symphony plus we are keeping the soul of yesteryears technology with was invented in the 1970s and making it compatible with the new technology,” he said.

In photo (from left to right): Manjay Khazanchi, Marco Sanguineti