One day in March, Walid Kodia and his team got an alert about a possible problem in one of the power plants he helps oversee at Tunisia’s state-owned electricity and gas utility, Société Tunisienne de l'Electricité et du Gaz (STEG). Gas turbines, which provide most of the power to STEG, are complicated machines that have an array of sensors to tell their operators when something’s off. This alert came from software running at GE Power’s monitoring and diagnostics center in Atlanta, staffed by engineers and data analysts.
The power station’s two existing Hitachi steam turbines will be retrofitted by GE and, says Mark Benjamin from GE Power Services, “to all intents and purposes turned into GE turbines”.