GE’s Global Electricity Monitoring & Diagnostics Center to Further Reduce Power Outages Worldwide with Large-Scale Industrial IoT Implementation

October 3, 2017

 GE Digital’s Asset Performance Management software, powered by Predix, to help reduce outages for the more than 500 power producers and utilities serving more than 350 million people around the world

San Ramon, Calif.; October 3, 2017: GE Digital (NYSE: GE) announced today that GE Power’s Monitoring & Diagnostics Center in Atlanta will utilize the company’s Predix-based Asset Performance Management (APM) software, bringing the strength of the Industrial IoT to power producers and utilities around the world. Running GE Digital’s APM solution will help further prevent power outages by increasing the reliability of the thousands of power producing turbines and generators monitored by the M&D Center.

According to the World Bank, unplanned power outages leave homes and businesses in many emerging countries without electricity for 15 or more days per month. In the United States, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) reports that the average power system suffers downtime and is unable to meet demand six percent of the time. 

“Data science plays a critical role in improving the reliability of the electricity supply to consumers,” said Russell Stokes, president & CEO of GE Power. “With GE Digital’s Asset Performance Management software, our M&D Center in Atlanta will further enhance its ability to forecast and prevent power outages worldwide.”

Large-scale Industrial IoT implementation will help decrease power outages

GE Power’s Atlanta M&D Center is an industry-leading power generation monitoring facility. Center experts have worked with customers to increase uptime while reducing operations and maintenance expenses for more than 20 years. Today, more than 500 power producers and utilities responsible for 900 power plants around the world use the M&D Center’s expert data scientists, engineering resources, and monitoring services to identify machine and equipment issues. Every day, the center receives more than 200 billion data tags coming from 1 million sensors attached to 5,000 assets in power plants across more than 60 countries.

In the current state, experts largely rely on email or phone calls to alert customers to potential outages. With Predix, the M&D Center’s customers who upgrade their contracts to the new APM-based services will gain a real-time view of asset data, enabling more effective, collaborative trouble-shooting with experts and enhancing their ability to forecast and prevent power outages through predictive maintenance alerts.

“GE Digital developed its APM analytics by analyzing more than 125 million hours of data from generators and turbines,” said Bill Ruh, CEO of GE Digital. “These analytics provide GE Digital with the unique ability to reduce unplanned downtime by up to 5 percent, reduce false alarms by up to 75 percent, and reduce operations and maintenance costs by up to 25 percent. Applied globally, this technology has the potential to transform lives, businesses and economies.”

APM is powered by Predix, GE Digital’s platform for the Industrial Internet. APM draws on a deep catalogue of analytics to identify patterns and trends in data that could indicate a problem with a machine’s performance. APM allows industrial businesses to increase machine reliability and availability while reducing maintenance costs and managing operations risks.

Typically, plant operators who run traditional monitoring capabilities have limited advanced notice when critical machine issues arise, making costly, unplanned outages more likely. M&D Center customers who utilize the APM application will have more time – in some instances from days up to several weeks notice – of potential issues. Increased notification allows for better productivity and reduced maintenance costs.

For a video about the use of GE’s APM software at GE Power’s Atlanta M&D Center, click here.

M&D-as-a-Service

In today’s dynamic energy market, many of the world’s power generation companies are faced with increased operational costs and falling energy prices. In order to optimize the productivity and reliability of assets, it is critical to make data driven decisions.

Today, GE launched a turnkey solution for customers to create their own monitoring and diagnostics centers of excellence. The M&D-as-a-Service offering is an end-to-end solution involving the construction, installation, process definition and training, along with all of the Predix-powered software needed to fully implement a remote operating center specifically designed to meet power portfolio needs. By co-locating expertise for reliability monitoring with plant operations, power producers and utilities businesses can achieve synergies that will accelerate desired business outcomes within the power and utility industry.

For more information on M&D-as-a-Service, click here.

About GE Digital

GE Digital is the leading software company for the Industrial Internet, reimagining industry's infrastructure by connecting software, apps and analytics to industrial businesses to drive a Predix-powered world. GE Digital creates software to design, build, operate and manage the entire asset lifecycle – enabling industrial businesses to operate faster, smarter and more efficiently. For more information, visit www.ge.com/digital.

GE Power Digital offers a full Digital Utility software suite to the energy industry that connects everything from assets to operations and business level functions for more profitable energy businesses. The Digital Utility software suite includes the APM application, GE’s Operations Optimization and Business Optimization applications, and Digital Worker solutions delivered via ServiceMax from GE Digital. For more information, visit https://www.ge.com/evn. 

GE Contacts

Ashley Nelson                                                                                     Ellie Holman

M: +1 925-316-9197                                                                           +1 508-698-7456

[email protected]                                                                      [email protected]