The following scenarios describe the delivery challenges facing power and utility companies and the technology system solutions offered by Microsoft and our partners:
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EMISSIONS
Business Challenge
Due to growing public concerns about climate change, utility and merchant generators are being tasked with reducing their carbon footprint. Amid the changing regulatory landscape and the concerns of customers and shareholders, utilities face constantly changing requirements. Utilities need to maintain flexibility to adapt to carbon restrictions. Power generators seeking to improve their emissions performance need to assemble technology to support reporting, alerting, collaboration, and business and operational intelligence.
Benefits
Even after the many pieces of corrective and efficiency-enhancing equipment are installed, the challenge is to generate and provide operational data, information, and analysis to each employee according to their job function and need. This new information flow requires utilities to organize their systems in novel ways. In addition, the effort also requires executive visibility, corporate-wide initiatives focused on carbon management, and the reorienting of employees to monitor and manage carbon emissions.
Partner IHS helps Power & Utility companies achieve their environmental health and sustainability goals by bringing together software, data and expertise into a comprehensive suite of sustainability management solutions to assess and respond to emerging issues, comply with global compliance obligations and convert business risk to opportunity.
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PLANT & FLEET OPTIMIZATION
Business Challenge
Plants need to run in order to produce supplies of electricity, gas and water. But they also need to run – or not run – in a coordinated fashion to maximize price and market opportunities. Utility companies need to decrease plant downtimes and reduce the costs of preventive maintenance, manage their assets strategically, prevent outages, improve thermal efficiency, and optimize capital spending
Benefits
Partners such as
Accenture,
Invensys and
OSIsoft provide a business and technology framework that pulls people, information, technologies, and processes together for a highly connected generation ecosystem that empowers plant and fleet operating excellence. Our plant and fleet performance solutions include key process and technology components and enable the management of complex portfolio of generation assets that include coal, gas, hydro, nuclear, solar and wind farms. Future delivery of plant and fleet optimization solutions through the cloud will further reduce IT costs and streamline delivery.
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PLANT INFORMATION AND CONTROL SYSTEMS
Business Challenge
Maximizing profits in competitive power markets requires rich communications and collaboration between the generation plant, wholesale marketing, and generation dispatch for accurate determination of the supply that can be delivered to the market at the right time and an optimal price.
Benefits
Microsoft partners such as
Accenture,
Invensys and
OSIsoft provide power plant control, automation tools and information systems that use the latest technology for power plant operations. Solutions from these partners employ the principles of role-based productivity (RBP). RBP provides visibility and insight into generation activities across an entire enterprise by simultaneously offering the right information to plant engineer, plant operator, plant manager, and VP of operations. Staff can access data quickly wherever they work, regardless of the application in use. The reporting and analysis function puts important information at the fingertips of power station conduction managers, making it easier for them to meet programming and supervision requirements. RBP also incorporates outside sources of information into the decision-making process. Utility companies will begin to understand and use services from cloud computing (forecasting, trading, equipment performance, and managing emissions) to enhance operations.
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WORK AND ASSET MANAGEMENT
Business Challenge
In an age when new plants aren’t being built and generation capacity is not expanding, the utility industry must focus on avoiding interruptions in everyday operations. Critical equipment failures can send shock waves throughout an organization and its supply chain, resulting in unplanned downtime, excess maintenance costs, lost productivity, reduced efficiency, delayed delivery times, and noncompliance with environmental laws and other regulations. Plant outages mean lost opportunity and lost income. Reliability is paramount, so preventing unplanned outages is imperative.
Benefits
Microsoft and partners such as Invensys-Avantis provide asset performance management solutions that deliver focused, real-time equipment performance, reliability, maintenance and decision support information for all asset types. These solutions empower operations and maintenance teams with decision support information, providing the right information to the right people at the right time and in the right context, thus improving operational performance, increasing asset availability/utilization and ultimately driving business value and real financial returns.