Operation & Maintenance of Power Plants
The extended workplace at ABB’s Collaborative Operations Centre in Genoa, Italy
collaborative model is that it can help an issue found across the engineering sector as a whole: increasing time and cost pressures coupled with a workforce where the seasoned experts are on their way out. Peterson-Sturm says: “We provide significant value around being integrated, being able to work in this collaborative way – being able to troubleshoot issues together, and to bring other types of resource to bear that would be outside of the conventional power plant. So we can bring in data scientists or business analysts, to solve problem. It’s definitely customer-led. It’s staff augmentation and it allows plants to scale that capability for a fixed cost.”
Creative revenue opportunities At the Genoa launch there was much talk of how ABB Ability will enable power plant operators to save money by making smarter decisions, but does it also tackle how they can create new revenue streams? “It’s a great question,” says Peterson-Sturm. “And the folks who are going to do really well in the face of this disruption are going to look
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at those new market opportunities. One prediction I have is that markets for firm capacity or ancillary services will probably become attractive and I think that is a creative revenue opportunity. “Profit opportunities have to do with
how you can basically participate more in those ancillary services markets; so that could be something about variable frequency regulation and expanding the amount of capacity you have to do that, for example, or black-start services. Outside of conventionals, if you look at integrated utilities, it’s about looking at extensions such as ‘could you be a service provider in the solar market?’or ‘could you be a service provider around batteries?’ and looking at different types of tariffs, for example.:”
Collaboration and smart grids Another key issue in the power sector today is that of smart grids. So how does ABB’s new model fit into this sphere? Peterson-Sturm explains: “One solution we’ve added is demand-side management. One of the technologies we have at ABB is called the Virtual Power Pool.
“If you look at traditional utility dispatch modelling, it’s chunky, there are big blocks of power and big blocks of demand, and it’s really hard to run in a real-time context – and that’s before you layer on availability. So we’ve been able to apply this Virtual Power Pool technology, and we’ve used in on islands, for instance, where fossil power is extremely expensive because you’re shipping in diesel oil. Te challenge right now is we have to find the tools that stand between this shift from the big utility model into a smaller markets, so anything we can do to let other players interact and engage with this more complex bigger power energy market is important. “In the context of a virtual power pool, not only can we do an aggregate forecast based on renewable capability but we can also actually set that schedule, send it to the wholesale power market operator and close the loop on the control systems. Which, if you think of someone individual doing that over a fleet of, say 2,000 small generating sites, that would be humanly impossible!” l
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