ORIGINAL REPORTING: GE’s digital power plant

How digital power plant tech can help utilities get the most from their assets; GE says its new plant technology can yield up to $230M in annual benefits for a gas plant

Herman K. Trabish, October 19, 2015 (Utility Dive)

As policymakers push for the integration of more variable renewable generation, the need to balance supply and demand on the grid in the most clean and efficient manner will only grow. While storage offers one solution, another big opportunity, especially in the short term, is optimizing existing peaker resources like GE's new digital power plant for the grid…

At its core, a digital power plant is a combination of software and hardware that interact in a generation plant to make it more flexible and responsive to grid demands...GE Power and Water, the company's power subsidiary, unvieled its offering last month, and aims to make its digital plants landmarks of the industrial internet as it moves toward fulfilling the promise of its 2014 annual report, “A new kind of industrial company.”

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The effort is part of GE's much-heralded corporate shift away from financeand back toward its industrial roots…Two things are necessary, scalable digital technologies that leverage real-time operational data and an insider’s understanding of the physical boundaries of the plant.

In a white paper released alongside its digital power plant announcement, GE foresees a “convergence of digital and physical innovations, together with advances in energy technologies…” The digital power plant is a realization of that vision…The wind industry leads the development, with over 4,000 turbines already running an early iteration of GE’s digital wind farm… click here for more

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