What you must know about ABB's Symphony Plus

Orders were just acquired.

ABB announced that in the two years since its launch, Symphony™ Plus control solutions won orders for new power plants that generate more than 25,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity, equivalent to the installed capacity of countries the size of the Netherlands, Malaysia or Egypt.

In addition, many plants have upgraded their existing systems with new Symphony Plus solution to meet their evolving needs. “The market response to Symphony Plus since its introduction has been extremely encouraging,” said Massimo Danieli, head of ABB’s Power Generation business, a part of the company’s Power Systems division.

“Reaching this important milestone in such a short time is a reinforcement of the confidence that customers have in Symphony Plus and we remain committed to safeguarding their investments.”

Some recent Symphony Plus project awards include the 700 MW Xiaoting supercritical coal-fired power plant in China ; the Samra thermal power plant, Jordan’s largest power plant with a generating capacity of 885 MW; Enel’s 590 MW Grazia Deledda Sulcis power plant in Italy; Dong Energy’s 250 MW Avedore Unit 1 in Denmark and the 125 MW Arlington Valley solar project in Arizona, which is one of the largest photovoltaic power plants in the US and two units of the Vinh Son hydropower plant in Vietnam.

ABB launched its Symphony™ Plus distributed control system (DCS) in April 2011 as its latest generation in the ‘Harmony’, ‘Melody’ series. With more than 6,500 systems installed over more than three decades – two thirds of these being in the power and water sectors - the Symphony family represents one of the largest installed bases of distributed control systems (DCS) in the world.

Symphony Plus is designed to meet a wide range of plant configurations and its flexibility and scalability enables it to serve small and server-less applications as well as large multi-system, multi-server architectures. It supports the seamless integration of field devices, process and turbine automation systems, electrical and SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) solutions as well as business and maintenance systems, providing a secure and reliable control environment.

The most recent additions to the Symphony Plus portfolio are new features and functionalities for geographically distributed applications like photovoltaic plants, hydropower stations and water distribution networks. The new capabilities address the challenge of incorporating large numbers of small modular units such as solar trackers, remote terminal units or pipeline sensors into a common operations hierarchy, while providing better visibility and control of the entire plant or network.

Symphony Plus was a reaffirmation of ABB’s commitment to continue investing in this platform based on an ‘evolution without obsolence’ approach of introducing new technology with enhanced benefits while protecting the long-term investment of customers by ensuring full compatibility with existing installations.

This helps customers to balance objectives like asset availability, operational reliability and production efficiency with asset life extension, carbon reduction and regulatory compliance.