Generation and Supply

With increased attention on 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 a constantly changing set of requirements. Utilities need to maintain flexibility and adapt as they face the prospect of an inevitable carbon cap-and-trade market. Power generators seeking to improve their emissions performance need to assemble technology to support reporting, alerting, collaboration, and business and operational intelligence.

Even when many of the pieces are already installed, the challenge is to provide operational data, information, and analysis to each employee according to need and job function. This requires that utilities organize their systems in new 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.

Microsoft and its partners provide a business and technology framework that pulls all of the people, information, technologies, and processes together for a highly connected generation ecosystem that empowers fleet operating excellence. Microsoft and its partners offer fleet performance solutions that include key process and technology components.

By implementing a fleet performance solution, utility companies can decrease plant downtime and reduce the associated cost of preventive maintenance, manage their assets strategically, prevent outages, improve thermal efficiency, and optimize capital spending.

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.

To address these challenges to the generating environment, the principle of role-based productivity (RBP) is key. RBP provides visibility and insight into generation activities across the 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.

In an age when generation capacity is not expanding, the utility industry must focus on avoiding interruptions in everyday operations. When critical equipment fails to perform as expected, it can send shock waves throughout an organization and its supply chain-causing 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.

Microsoft and its partners extend enterprise and plant decision support systems to improve the competitiveness and profitability of individual generating plants within the fleet environment.

Utilities use trading and risk management systems to balance the conflicting challenges of demand spikes and downturns against fuel price volatility and logistics, weather uncertainties, and competition. Trading mistakes and overexposure to risk often cause already thin margins to evaporate.

Using the Microsoft .NET architecture, partners have designed energy trading, transaction, and risk management software that gives traders, risk managers, and other decision makers fully scalable, flexible solutions that are easy to integrate, deploy, and modify-enabling companies throughout the energy industry to gain compelling advantages while keeping pace with volatile markets and emerging strategies. In addition, partner solutions are available to capture, track, and manage every traded energy commodity, so that users can manage even the most complex generation fuel supply.