Industrial
Internet
Applications
By Eric Mino, GE Hitachi Nuclear
Energy.
Eric Mino
Eric Mino joined GE in 2005 and has
held a variety of
positions at GE
Hitachi Nuclear
Energy including
Nuclear Controls
and Systems
Upgrades Manager,
Innovation
Leader and Vice
President of Asset
Management
Services. He
currently serves
as Vice President
of Digital Nuclear
Services. Eric
holds a Bachelor
of Science in
Facilities and Plant
Engineering from
the Massachusetts
Maritime
Academy and a
Master of Business Administration
from the University of North Carolina
Wilmington.
Responses to questions by Newal
Agnihotri, Editor of Nuclear Plant
Journal.
Exelon Generation has utilized data
and analytics to optimize performance
at Limerick Generating Station. Now the
utility is working with GEHitachi Nuclear
Energy to develop digital solutions based
on GE’s Predix platform.
1. Last year, it was announced that
Exelon would pilot GE’s Predix platform.
How did this decision come about?
GE Hitachi (GEH) and our GE
Digital Teams have been working with
Exelon since the summer of 2014 to
explore how Exelon could benefit from
the Predix platform. Exelon saw our
approach with Predix as a Platform as
a Service (PaaS)
solutionunique in the
Industrial Internet
arena. Exelon and
GEH also had very
c o m p l e m e n t a r y
thought processes
and goals around
i n n o v a t i o n ,
digitization and the
use of advanced
analytics.
Predix
is designed to be
system
agnostic,
which means it is
able to interact with
existing
systems
and infrastructure.
The fact that Exelon
would be able to
leverage its existing
analytics with Predix
and then merge and
develop new analytics on the Predix
platform was an additional major benefit.
2. Describe the Predix Platform and
the applications that are being built on
Predix for the energy industry?
Predix is the platform that powers
GE’s Industrial Internet applications.
The Predix platform is a secure, cloud-
based platform built for and by industry
experts to support the unique scale
and requirements of industrial data.
The platform was designed to allow
developers to quickly build, test and
deploy applications for highly regulated
industries and incorporates decades of
experience in operational and information
security. To help corporations like Exelon
deliver on commitments by operating
proactively and predictively, this software
technology can align operational and
performance insights agnostically across
the full spectrum of generating options.
The Industrial Internet is all about
connecting big data, machines and
the people who operate them. With
this in mind, GE recently unveiled our
vision for the Digital Power Plant at
our global
2015 Minds + Machines
conferences held in San Francisco and
Dubai. The Digital Power Plant enables
greater efficiency and output, more
flexibility for a range of generation
types including intermittent sources, and
helps grid stability. The Predix platform
and solutions are at the heart of the
Digital Power Plant, where three core
Predix suites are pulled together: Asset
Performance Management, Operations
Optimization and Business Optimization.
Digital Power Plant’s
Asset Perfor-
mance Management (APM)
suite of
applications helps our customers reduce
plant downtime and production costs
through predictive and physics-based
analytics. By taking a holistic, predic-
tive maintenance approach coupled with
decades of monitoring and diagnostics
(M&D) experience, we are helping op-
erators manage their power plants at high
levels of performance and reliability. Ev-
ery day at GE’s remote M&D Center in
Atlanta, we collect more than 30,000 op-
erating hours of data from a fleet of more
than 1,500 assets. Insights drawn from
this volume of power generation big data
have translated to total customer savings
estimated at $70 million in 2014, up from
more than $53 million in 2013.
For example, one of the pilot projects
at a plant within Exelon’s nuclear
fleet is called Watchtower and focuses
on equipment reliability by utilizing
APM. The ability to foresee and forestall
issues is at the very core of APM for the
power industry. Reliability management
combines
predictive
advisories,
expert diagnostics and situational
troubleshooting
to
turn
reactive
maintenance processes into predictive
ones. Analysts and operators can
benchmark and compare the performance
of assets, anticipate conflicts to improve
reliability and extend overall asset output.
Digital Power Plant’s
Operations
Optimization
suite of applications drives
better plant and fleet performance
across equipment manufacturers, site
20
NuclearPlantJournal.com Nuclear Plant Journal, January-February 2016
