Industrial software helps the power industry deliver electricity reliably, profitably, and efficiently – while reaching sustainability goals.

Dispatches from AVEVA World 2023

Posted: December 15, 2023

Recently, I had a chance to attend AVEVA World 2023 in San Francisco, AVEVA’s global user conference which brought together over 350 power and utilities industry professionals among the nearly 2500 customers, partners, analysts, and product and industry experts in attendance. 

Across three days and through more than two dozen dedicated sessions, our customers shared how they are leveraging industrial software to navigate shifting their energy mix to greener alternatives while ensuring continuity of service for their customers amid rising capital costs, frequent labor and climate disruptions, and an increasingly complex grid environment as more DERs are integrated into the supply.

Software interoperability brings new opportunities

This was the second in-person AVEVA World event since the 2021 merger of OSIsoft and AVEVA—bringing OSIsoft’s world-class PI System data management together with AVEVA’s leading industrial software.  As I took in different presentations over the course of the week, I was struck by how generators and utilities are now taking advantage of AVEVA bringing together our different industrial software solutions through seamless interoperability.

As the volume of useful industrial data is exploding across industrial organizations, the now-native connections between AVEVA™ PI System™ and the other AVEVA software products like AVEVA™ Predictive Analytics and AVEVA™ Unified Operations Center are making it easier for decision-makers across the power industry ecosystem to access, visualize and analyze that data. As a result, they have the ability to break down functional silos and collaborate more efficiently with others to solve pressing issues.

Power and utilities stories from AVEVA World

Here’s just a small sample of customer presentation highlights from the event:

Dominion Energy , an energy services provider in the southeastern United States, illustrated how AVEVA PI System was a critical tool to help navigate the tricky world of fast-paced innovation in a highly regulated industry. In an industry that must avoid risk in the name of reliability, Dominion sought to build an evergreen centralized data model that could integrate EMS, ADMS, SAP, SQL and other data sources into a common asset framework that must be able to accommodate 5,000-10,000 point updates a week as new assets come online and older ones are retired.  At the conference, Dominion shared details of their successful implementation, including use cases around the maintenance of Load Tap Changes (LTC), VOLT VAR Control, and enabling geo-spatial visualization capabilities.  Based on the successful implementation to date, Dominion said it plans to quadruple the size of its full-time engineering analytics team to take advantage of all the new insights it can gain through this data convergence capability.

B. Grimm Power, a Thailand-based energy company that focuses on the development, financing, construction, and operation of greenfield power plants, shared how it used AVEVA PI System and AVEVA Predictive Analytics to bring a data-driven approach to its maintenance strategy.  Because its Operations and Maintenance (O&M) staff concluded that the condition-based monitoring capability in place was insufficient, and because they were inexperienced with big data analytics, B. Grimm turned to the AVEVA solutions available to address its need to shorten plant outage duration without jeopardizing reliability and performance. Through the successful implementation of these innovative technologies, it could detect early signs of failure and conduct turbomachinery diagnosis to locate defects.  The program resulted in a 50% reduction in outage duration and reduced maintenance costs by over US$1M while lowering the risk of failure and enabling their existing O&M staff.

Adani Power is the largest private thermal power producer in India with plants in nine locations, each using different proprietary software solutions. The disparate software solutions made it difficult to aggregate and analyze data across the company. Challenges in India’s power sector over the past few years motivated the company to deploy best-in-class technologies to improve results. Deploying a centralized data layer on AVEVA PI System as the foundation for critical power scheduling systems has given operators reliable information from which to make better decisions. Having relevant and accurate information from across the entire grid has allowed the company to realize operating efficiencies, reduce commercial losses and boost profitability. 

Meridian Energy generates nearly 30% of New Zealand’s electricity​ with over 2800 MW of 100% renewable-sourced installed capacity. It shared how it’s using AVEVA PI System, the asset framework capability, and AVEVA™ PI Vision™ to collect, analyze, and contextualize critical metrics across its entire generation fleet. Meridian highlighted a use case for hydro unit fatigue monitoring to improve its visibility into operating metrics and provide sufficient data to drive condition-based monitoring. Through successful implementation, Meridian Energy can analyze stopping sequences and gain insight at the component level and monitor degradation over time to better optimize the way it operates and maintains its generating assets.

Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) provides natural gas and electric service to residential and business customers in northern and central California.  At the conference, PG&E shared how AVEVA PI System was a cornerstone for its operations. AVEVA PI System integrated with its Schneider Electric ADMS and enabled convergence of critical IT and OT data.  By leveraging AVEVA PI System’s asset framework capability and AVEVA PI Vision, PG&E created a user-friendly visualization of ADMS-based information and programmatic access for integration with other software applications.  PG&E reported that this upgrade to its ADMS is improving the visibility, operability, and security of its grid assets, which benefits not only daily operations, but the increasingly critical wildfire mitigation processes required due to climate change.

It was extremely exciting to see these real-world results shared at the conference.  These are just a handful of the innovative use cases of digital transformation from the power industry that I heard during AVEVA World 2023. 

If you are interested in discovering more stories of how our solutions connect industrial communities and enable more sustainable industries, please visit our archive of not only our most recent event presentations but thousands of other stories of digital transformations from events past.