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The GE Brief – December 13, 2018

December 13, 2018
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GE TO LAUNCH STANDALONE DIGITAL BUSINESS


GE announced today plans to establish a new independent digital business focused on developing software for the industrial internet of things. The yet-unnamed new company will bring together software solutions that include products like GE Digital’s Asset Performance Management, as well as the GE Power Digital and Grid Software Solutions business units. GE said the company will “provide software for asset-intensive industries with a focus on the power, renewables, aviation, oil and gas, food and beverage, chemicals, consumer packaged goods and mining industries.”

Generating data, generating value: The new business will start with $1.2 billion in annual software revenue and an existing global customer base. GE said the company “is intended to be a GE wholly-owned, independently run business with a new brand and identity, its own equity structure, and its own board of directors."" GE also announced an agreement to sell a majority stake in ServiceMax, a leading provider of field service management software, to the private equity firm Silver Lake Partners.

Read more about the plan here.

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER


In the time it will take you to finish lunch today, GE Power Digital’s software will successfully manage 864 million kilowatt-hours of electricity — enough to power the city of Atlanta for two months. That’s a stupendous amount of energy, but we’re still at the very beginning of the revolution promised by the Industrial Internet of Things, writes GE Power’s chief digital officer, Steven Martin. Each of GE Power’s 1,200-plus customers adds many terabytes of data to the IIoT pool every day. The size and importance of the power market ensures there will be substantial competition.

Leader of the pack: Delivering outcomes to this market requires three specific things, Martin writes: firsthand domain knowledge, operational systems and a scalable platform. In an op-ed for GE Reports, Martin outlines why each of these factors is paramount for industrial success into the future. And he explains how GE Power is delivering, whether it’s the 900,000 analytics run daily on the world’s largest fleet of gas turbines — spread out across 60 countries and covering 350 million people — or the 40 percent of all electricity on earth that’s managed by GE software at some point in its life cycle, from the power plant to the power socket.

Want to learn more? Steven Martin will socket to you here.

MINING THE DIGITAL MOUNTAIN


Every day, power plants generate gigabytes of valuable information that could improve efficiency — but much of it never gets used. That’s changing. Last year the New York Power Authority, the largest state public utility in the U.S., opened a sparkling new mission-control center that enables it to monitor the mountains of data flowing from its power plants and mine it for insights. The goal? To extract as much efficiency as possible from all 16 of NYPA’s plants and its massive transmission network, which supplies power to New York City’s airports and subways. The new facility, called the Integrated Smart Operations Center, is powered in part by software and analytics from GE Digital.

Full steam ahead: Charles Proteus Steinmetz, a groundbreaking mathematician and GE electrical engineer, liked to point out that energy in the form of heat, water or steam was the raw material of the electrical industry — and boy, did he hate to see it wasted. It’s a safe bet Steinmetz, who died in 1923, would’ve taken a shine to industrial analytics. The International Energy Agency reported in 2017 that in the U.S. alone, digitization had the potential to save around $80 billion a year, or about 5 percent of total annual power-generation costs. At the new NYPA facility, information collected from sensors that monitor temperature, vibrations, wear and factors like energy usage flows through various IIoT applications. Sanjay Chopra, a solution architect from GE Digital, says, “We help them proactively resolve a problem before it becomes a major disruption.”

Chopra and colleagues are disrupting the energy industry — for the better. Learn more here.

ENERGY EFFICIENCY PAR EXELON


The energy company Exelon generates enough electricity to supply millions of customers in 48 states and parts of Canada. Its power plants, wind and solar farms, hydroelectric plants and nuclear power stations also pump out a lot of valuable data about wind speeds, swings in consumer demand, repair outings and other details. In 2015, it started pooling this data in the cloud and trawling it for insights to make its power plants smarter. And then it got a bigger net: Exelon teamed up with GE Power to sift its data through software apps.

Predicting the future: One place to start is maintenance-related costs and downtime. By crunching performance and historical data, apps can suggest when to make repairs or replace specific parts. Software can also help Exelon balance electricity generation as the share of renewable energy grows. Electrical grids need to maintain a delicate balance of supply and demand or risk shutting down. Renewables make it especially hard to maintain that balance because the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine. But apps can help Exelon predict demand and know when and to what extent to engage the gas-fired power plants that must pick up the slack when renewables waver.

Learn more about this supply of innovation here.

 

— VIDEO OF THE WEEK —








— QUOTE OF THE DAY —


“As an early leader in IIoT, GE has built a strong business with its industrial customers thanks to deep domain knowledge and software expertise. As an independently operated company, our digital business will be best positioned to advance our strategy to focus on our core verticals to deliver greater value for our customers, and generate new value for shareholders.”


— H. Lawrence Culp Jr., GE Chairman and CEO.

 




Quote: GE Reports. Image: Getty Images.

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