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Today’s enterprise management software can maximize design, build, operate and dispatch activities for generating assets.
By Steve Blankinship, Associate Editor
It wasn’t exactly opening night for a new Edward Albee play, but still, there was drama on both sides of the stage lights. About a dozen people huddled on a stage at the JFK Library in Boston to act out a scenario as an audience of about 100 people looked on. Arrayed about the “actors” were large display screens and numerous laptop computers. The demonstration featured the fictional DaCosta Corporation, which operates gas, fractionation and chemical plants.
In the dramatization, DaCosta successfully integrated 18 different plant-level and enterprise-level applications from six vendors into a common enterprise management system to solve a problem and maximize profits. The fictional corporation’s plant models - and the solution demonstrated - were based largely on actual customer applications and real-world domain knowledge. The stage set was a collaboration wall - a 10-foot long video display - and other enterprise integration tools that show information from diverse plant, enterprise and portal applications. Using the collaboration wall, DaCosta’s geographically dispersed plant managers, a corporate planner and the operations VP reviewed real-time production information and performance dashboards from control systems displayed in Microsoft Excel and real-time condition monitoring in addition to information and maintenance schedules in order to determine the best actions to take.
Power Industry Applications
Similar scenarios are applicable to the power industry as it builds a new generation of coal and nuclear plants and operates them in volatile power markets. It can also help the industry’s independent system operators (ISOs) and regional transmission organizations (RTOs) cope with decision-making. That goes for independent power producers (IPPs) as well, whose plants were designed to operate in dynamic power markets.
Enterprise management, often referred to as enterprise resource management (ERM), describes software that enables participants in any large, complex endeavor to access network resources efficiently. ERM software generally lets a user sign on to different enterprise systems and applications using the same password and allows all systems to work in seamless harmony to provide information needed to make decisions.
Tom Szudajski, director of global power marketing for Invensys, is a former service engineer with GE and worked for 20 years in power engineering capacities for Milwaukee-based WE Energy. He says there are several important points to understand when talking about what state-of-the-art enterprise management can do for a power plant or fleet of them, whether designing or operating them. Among the advanced applications that can help manage utility assets are third-party technologies that incorporate advanced sensors into decision support processes to provide real-time cost and performance data for the entire fleet. Another important function is providing an integrated engineering environment that incorporates engineering tools directly into control system configurations tied to realistic simulation.
His company sells the InFusion enterprise control system as a platform for asset performance management that allows needed engineering and control software packages to be kept current.
In addition to simulation that helps train operators and improves quality operation, InFusion provides engineers with control schemes to see how controls will work on a real unit, and a training tool to help them understand how a system operates, in addition to what they can or can’t do with a system. It also keeps information in all packages up to date.
Another element to consider in comprehensive asset management is the ability to incorporate best business applications that provide monitoring and decision making across the fleet. “That aspect relates to issues around ISOs and RTOs in particular,” says Szudajski. “Dispatch of units for regional transmission authorities requires multiple readings indicating transmission bottlenecks, fuel costs, performance and emission requirements,” he says. It is hard to get a single application that incorporates all of them. The platform also allows fleet monitoring integrating forecasting information with contractual and system restrictions, allowing people to make the best decisions around those issues.
“It’s almost like on the old Star Trek,” says Szudajski, referring to the scenes when the fictional Captain Kirk turns to everyone on the bridge and says “‘On Screen’ and gets everyone involved in the process at the same time with access to the same data.”
It is also critical that enterprise management systems avoid obsolescence by being able to migrate existing systems.
Deployed in the Real World
Enterprise management systems are being applied in several major power industry applications. One of the most visible is in the construction of Wisconsin Public Service Weston 4 - a 500 MW supercritical coal-fired unit scheduled for commercial operation in 2008. Coordination of design and construction elements must be maintained among such entities as Kansas City-based Black & Veatch, Weston 4’s principal architect-engineer, and vendors across the United States and around the world. They include Voith in Germany, Toshiba in Japan, and Babcock & Wilcox, which is supplying boiler parts from Canada and Europe.
Senior Engineer Rodney Howard is distributed control system (DCS) contract manager for WPS Weston 4. “When we started the due diligence it was a clean slate,” says Howard. “One of the things that really stuck out was the ability to share the source code between the SimSci Esscor simulator and Foxboro DCS rather than having to develop a layer of logic in the simulator. The beauty is that you can port the logic in from the DCS into the simulator so if we went with the Foxboro DCS and SimSci Esscor simulator it would eliminate that layer of another supplier’s platform. None of the other vendors at that time had that relationship, so that was definitely a plus.”
WPS also wanted the system to serve as a starting point for future standardization across the existing fleet. “We wanted to use diagnostics with the onboard system and find a way to feed that into a CMMS system,” says Howard. “We wanted Weston 4 to drive technology for the company, at least at the control level, which is important if we are truly concerned with a real-time or near real-time enterprise and making it operate automatically. That requires bringing diagnostics up and into the system.”
Howard explains that for the Weston 4 project, WPS incorporated all vendor PLC code into the Foxboro I/A Series DCS processors. The reason for integrating all controls into the DCS was partly based on the desire to have all programming on a single platform and a full virtual simulation of the plant. That also allows broad use of automatic startup and shutdown logic sequencers to achieve consistency and remain in environmental compliance.
A Simulator Tool
Szudajski says that with WPS, Invensys has done something that it has experimented with in nuclear plants that use the simulator as a design tool. “You design a central configuration and port that over to the simulator,” he says. “The simulator has high fidelity models in it with the graphics we would have on the real unit. So there’s an opportunity to experiment; to load the unit up and down and run it through the sequencing. We were able to keep those themes for process response, scheduling and control logic. So they’re using an extended file allocation table (FAT) to fine-tune and tweak and build that system to exactly what they want it to be.”
He believes it’s a highly valuable tool for dealing with the brain drain issue. “You have people who don’t have experience in a supercritical plant. They’ve worked smaller coal plants so they understand the process, but the complexity increases exponentially. So it is important for them to learn that process without jeopardizing the real unit.” He adds that the aging workforce issue extends to the architect-engineers and construction engineers. “They have also lost the people who have built most of the coal plants. But a simulation capability is a tool for them as well.”
Combining simulation with design applications may have advantages, he said. “During the preliminary model stage, the simulator spotted a design issue before we actually had fabrication underway. So we got in front of something that could have been expensive to fix if we hadn’t caught it before startup. So you can almost make the argument that the simulator has already paid for itself.”
Howard adds that the system will allow Weston 4 to have plant automation logic allowing for fully automated startup and shutdown. There will be overriding sequencers that will bring the unit up automatically to a steady state. “And when we shut it down, we will bring it down in a steady state keeping all our environmental requirements and regulatory permitting numbers in check. The automation won’t allow us to violate any emission levels in the startup or shutdown mode. It will simply go into a halt stage until we find out what’s going on.”
Visualizing Dispatch Choices
Navigating today’s deregulated markets requires analyzing layers of information to make dispatch decisions. That drives the application to compress and present data in visual formats. That challenge applies to vertically integrated utilities, IPPs, RTOs and ISOs.
In the past, vertically integrated utilities dispatched units based on what they thought was best in terms of lowest cost and best reliability. That is now largely a paradigm of the past. Today, regulators want to use independent generation as much as possible to get the lowest cost to customers. For utilities to use their generation resources to maximum benefit requires sorting through complex tolling agreements and complicated generation requirements. Regional transmission grids are buying baseload power and cycling power. They must consider and factor service quality, reliability and spinning reserves while dealing with multiple bilateral agreements, business systems and protocols. “These are the kinds of applications enterprise management provides in terms of system risk and reserve issues,” says Szudajski. “It’s difficult to incorporate all the applications needed to do it.”
Invensys is currently working with independent power provider Williams Power, which has selected an InFusion-based generation management system (GMS) for its generation fleet. The assets include a dozen generating plants across seven states. The new system will integrate data from many different automation systems and applications to help Williams schedule delivery of generation capacity from each plant according to demand.
The GMS will monitor demand trend data by communicating with the three contracted ISOs that serve California (CAISO), the Midwest (MISO) and Mid-Atlantic states (PJM). In the competitive deregulated generation market, ISOs are responsible for monitoring and directing the flow of wholesale electric power into and throughout the distribution grids that serve their regional markets. “Having all plant data and market demand data in a centralized business decision support environment will allow Williams to provide set-point dispatch control for production from the generating plants on an hourly basis,” says Szudajski. “The real-time scheduling will help prevent shortfalls in capacity and also prevent generating too much electricity. That minimizes economic risk in the business and optimizes production value of each generation asset.”
