Renewables are a primary topic of discussion at Emerson’s 2024 Ovation™ Users Group conference in Pittsburgh, and in a presentation by James Fraser, Brett Benson, Ole Binderup, and Matthew Roberts, attendees could quickly see why. The group shared the many ways the energy landscape is changing, and first and foremost among them is the rise in renewables—often outpacing fossil production. Consequently, it’s not surprising that the shift is on everyone’s mind.
It’s not only global demand, James explained, but also tax incentives (such as those from the Inflation Reduction Act) driving the shift. Today, even battery storage is qualified for investment tax credits alongside wind and solar generation, and the innovators are coming out in droves to capitalize on it. New local production facilities are being established across the globe, with high investments in greenfield solar, wind, and battery storage, and even brownfield investments are happening as retrofits take wind farms by storm.
Change brings challenges
With all this change comes new challenges in the energy industry. In wind generation, providers are often struggling with old turbines that underperform, and lock away the critical data operators and technicians need to drive optimal production. The obvious solution—replacing the turbines with newer models—is more challenging than it seems. Not only are new turbines costly to install, but they also are not allowed in many places as regulations have tightened significantly since the earliest installations.
“The challenge is we want to build new assets, but we also have a lot of assets we want to keep in operation for the next 20 to 30 years. The challenge with all of these existing turbines is they are 10 to 20 years old, so all the technology is a different generation than what we use today.”
Fortunately, Ole shared, Emerson offers many solutions with its Ovation Green wind turbine control system retrofits. Emerson can quickly and easily replace the control system of nearly any legacy turbine with a modern Ovation control system, typically with a native condition monitoring system as well, to give operators full control of their wind hardware. A new control system gives operators full ownership of their assets, letting them see and manage all the asset variables they need, leading to increased availability, lower operation and maintenance costs, and increased production.
However, even if you’re still in a long-term service agreement, Ovation Green SCADA can unlock more data, so there’s still a good reason to invest in Ovation Green SCADA for new installs. Brett explained,
“The OEM will want their SCADA in place, but we can put our SCADA in parallel. So, in your remote operations center you can still have a common, single pane of glass for your fleet, and the OEM can still have their SCADA.”
Struggles with solar
Solar PV provides its own set of challenges—especially to teams with most of their experience in thermal power plants. Solar plants have a wide variety of components—thousands of panels, dozens of trackers, hundreds of inverters, and they all must be tied into the power plant controller. Such a plant may have zero hardwired I/O, but 100,000 mapped datalink points! And few organizations will have only one site. Typically, they will need to aggregate data from multiple sites together into one common control room and operating environment.
“We often think solar is easy. And on the surface, it looks easy. But as an engineer, it can be really hard because there are so many different points you’re trying to put together and ultimately, you’re only controlling a little bit.”
Even if the operations team manages to pull all those data points together manually, they still face a seemingly never-ending stream of evolving grid requirements. Fortunately, Matt explained, Emerson’s Ovation Green Solar PV solutions can cut through the complexity for easier overall control and management of solar operations.
“Everything within Ovation Green revolves around how we think about these projects differently. How do we break everything up and recognize that data is the name of the game?”
A changing world
Today, many organizations are gathering data from many sites, often of many different types. Emerson’s Ovation Green SCADA can connect all an organization’s assets, at the site level all the way up to the fleet level for a comprehensive view in a single, intuitive and cohesive dashboard.
Whether it is at the site level or fleet level, the industry is evolving, and Emerson’s innovative technologies and software combine to help power providers through that transition.
We’ve seen a lot already in the Ovation Users’ Group conference, and it is only day three. Stay tuned to the Emerson Automation Experts blog for continuing coverage of the event!
