Reliability is a primary focus across all manufacturers and producers. For electrical power producers, it’s especially critical to be able to respond to the instantaneous demands placed on the grid.
In a Power article, The POWER Interview: Emerson Exec Discusses Grid Enhancements, Emerson’s James Nyenhuis shares ways technology and transformed work practices can drive reliability performance enhancements.
In the Q&A article, James is asked about ways to improve reliability in transmission and distribution. He highlights the alarm and alerts with the control system as an essential area to address.
Many plants we engage with today are still burdened by underperforming alarm management systems that overload operations staffs and induce reliability risk by making it harder for operations teams to identify evolving issues. Significant impacts to reliability can be made with the right investment in optimizing the performance of the alarm system and providing clear identification to off-design process conditions to plant personnel.
Advanced control strategies can help address these off-design conditions since they can:
…provide better coordinated responses due to their predictive control capabilities. These predictive capabilities allow the control actions to better steer through transient dynamic conditions and maintain stability, providing the plant an increased chance to stay online after these types of events.
Having proactive reliability management systems:
…allow us to automatically communicate with assets and provide automated reporting and confirmation of expected operation. If the need arises, there’s the ability to proactively notify the appropriate personnel via text or email of a potential problem that needs attention.
Incorporating operational expertise into the automation is essential from a transformed work practice perspective.
This leads to embedding the best practice operational procedures in sequence automation that can be leveraged over and over, driving consistency and repeatability. Tracking the appropriate metrics over time, such as startup times or fuel consumption, as well as operator interactions with the distributed control system, shows that operational consistency is enhanced and, over a longer time horizon, reductions in overall lost megawatt-hours have been achieved, directly improving reliability goals.
Advanced process control, such as Model Predictive Control, can enhance reliability by managing the process away from off-design situations.
When the control can be predictive in nature, we have seen it have a better ability to coordinate multiple control responses, ideally returning a process to a stable state after a critical upset, even if it is at a degraded output. For example, we have seen model predictive drum level controls better manage upsets to dynamic steam transition issues related to a combined cycle bypass system. When we have the predictive ability to steer the process through the upset, we increase the ability to avoid unit trips, which increases overall process reliability.
Read the article for more on James’ thoughts on redundancy, data analysis, and modernization.
Visit the Ovation Automation Platform section on Emerson.com for more on the technologies and solutions to drive more reliable power generation, transmission
