Everything You Need to Know About Operations Management (OPM) for Power Generation

Why do we need OPM?

Every day, thousands of new machines come online to join the countless endpoints already connected through the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). But what good is all the data if it doesn’t lead to better outcomes?     

To help industry make better use of the enormous volume of industrial process data suddenly at their fingertips, industrial companies are using a software solution purpose-built for industry to drive smarter decision-making and higher efficiency - Operations Performance Management (OPM).

Enabled by secure edge-to-cloud technology, Operations Performance Management improves the performance of plants, sites, and generation portfolios by analyzing historical data, plant operations and other data sources to monitor and diagnose issues or areas of improvement, predict capacity and its cost to improve day ahead and intraday planning, deliver executable advice or close the loop and drive desired outcomes for improved efficiency, flexibility, capacity and emissions. 

Transitioning for energy industry change

In the face of decentralization, deregulation, and decarbonization, innovative IIoT solutions hold great promise for the energy industry to improve business operations, increase operational efficiencies, reduce unplanned downtime, and efficiently balance supply and demand. Additionally, IIoT solutions are connecting data and analytics from the sensor to the cloud and from the maintenance department to the trading desk turning bits and bytes into actionable information.

With IIoT solutions power generators are able to improve worker safety, enable predictive maintenance, improve plant performance, and challenge information silos across organizations. Interoperability is essential.

Energy companies make their margins by managing assets as efficiently as possible while addressing environmental, health, and safety requirements and meeting changing consumer expectations.

Today’s utilities are investing to integrate renewable resources into the grid, support a flexible power flow, and reduce O&M costs. Reducing systemic waste and having and increased understanding of maintenance requirements with the insights from IIoT solutions could make an enormous difference.

According to a recent report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, digitizing operations, and maintenance (O&M) can reduce levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) up to 6%. The industry is turning to IIoT solutions to eliminate operational uncertainty, reduce systemic waste, and break down operational silos.

Operations Performance Management (OPM) software helps central operations, fleet managers, and power plant managers improve productivity by providing decision support for daily operations and strategic planning and by providing closed-loop plant optimization.

The benefits of implementing an OPM solution are:

• Maximize productivity and margins through efficient and flexible production planning, performance monitoring, and diagnostics processes.
• Accelerate time-to-value with an out-of-the-box key performance indicator (KPI) catalog of thermal performance and financial calculations.
• Meet financial targets by leveraging improved performance, capacity, and heat rate predictions that project cost, revenue, and margin to meet financial targets.
• Build certainty that your operating plan will optimize use of plant capabilities without impacting reliability.
• Enable operational decision-making for rapid response to market demands. OPM provides accurate, clear, and complete situational awareness to maximize outcomes.

Key components of an operations performance management solution

GE Digital provides an OPM software solution that improves the performance of plants, sites, and generation portfolios with Performance Intelligence, Production Planning and Performance Optimization. This suite of software tools designed to boost revenues and widen profit margins by streamlining industrial processes and optimizing throughput across multiple sites. The features within OPM leverage real-time analytics collected by IIoT sensor networks to provide a portfolio-wide view of business operations, and more importantly, actionable insights to improve these processes.  

OPM Performance Intelligence helps power generators to achieve operating targets through benchmarking, analytics-based alerts, and advisors.  As operations change, it enables plants to maintain optimal performance by monitoring not just thermal performance but also flexible operating modes, such as starts, ramping and min load, and uses plant level diagnostics to quickly identify and cost effectively address performance shortfalls.

What traders and plant operators have traditionally lacked are comprehensive, timely and accurate data and tools that provide an integrated single source of truth to make sense of it all. Only with a complete picture of the operations, maintenance, and actual capability of a  plant, coupled with market and environmental conditions, is it possible to make decisions about dispatch that maximize revenues while reducing fuel and maintenance costs.

OPM Production Planning software assists Traders and Dispatch Planners to optimize under uncertainty to reduce generation costs and increase profitable generating revenue. It operationalizes predictive and prescriptive analytics to reduce future uncertainty and remove inefficiencies held between the asset/system capabilities and the commercial/operating teams.

It enables improved visibility of day-ahead and intraday plant capacity and its cost. It also provides advice on how to make the most profitable use of that capacity through commitment preparation, fuel nomination, and dispatch planning. With solution-supported operational insights into factors such as the available capacity – its value and cost – in conjunction with a range of plant specific constraints such as marketplace conditions, emissions limits, fuel penalties, start-up and turndown durations and cost, better economic-based decisions can be made regarding energy offers and dispatch.

And, OPM Performance Optimization safely expands operating limits with optimizers and advanced edge controls to enhance dispatch position by improving efficiency, generate more revenue with increased output, achieving faster starts and reducing emissions, and thrive in the marketplace by responding more flexibly to diverse market conditions.

By employing a combination of AI/ML technology, industry and technology expertise, highly configurable software, and world-class support services, OPM streamlines complex operations and improves outcomes.