Power plant performance management

Abstract

Plant operation can be supported by continuous on-line monitoring of equipment states, enabling users to move towards predictive maintenance and to postpone inspection outages, reducing downtime and cost. On-line process monitoring and operator advisory systems support early detection of causes for sub-optimal plant operation and thus help to reduce fuel cost. Remote access to plant data makes it possible for plant owners and service providers dealing with geographically widely distributed assets to keep labor cost low by deploying specialists among multiple sites from one single location. Plant and Enterprise Management will profit from the integration of data from process-oriented systems (process control, performance monitoring, maintenance management etc.) with business systems (financial tracking, load scheduling, energy trading, etc.) and will thus be able to secure competitive advantages by quickly reacting to changing market needs based on up-to-the-minute information on, e.g. fuel cost, availability, load forecasts.