The New York Power Authority (NYPA) has been at the forefront of technology with the aim of increasing productivity and efficiency and reducing costs. Now, in partnership with General Electric, the NYPA is planning on using sensors to analyze its 16 power plants and over 1,400 miles of transmission lines. The NYPA’s billion dollar investment in asset performance analytics should yield double that amount in savings.
GE’s Predix analytics platform is used to connect industrial assets, collecting, and analyzing data and delivering real-time insights for optimizing industrial infrastructure and operations. It uses physics-based and statistical algorithms to model and predict how assets will perform in real time. The partnership with The NYPA will be the biggest system-wide deployment to date. The project will begin at four of NYPA’s natural gas-fired peaker plants, using asset performance management (APM) software to boost efficiencies.
The next step will be to incorporate Predix into the integrated smart operations center (ISOC) currently under construction. ISOC will serve a central command station for its power plant and grid operations, customer operations, and its emergency response system.
It is the creation of digital avatars that makes the analytics system unique. GE’s software will use the data from the sensor system to design a twin of all of the equipment in the power system. These virtual models will serve to predict failures, allowing for proactive rather than reactive responses.
