Surrounded by data but starved for insights: How AVEVA helps the power industry maximize the value of data

Written by Douglas Nunez, Sr. Infrastructure and Utilities Marketing Manager, AVEVA

The power industry is becoming more complicated. Renewable penetration is increasing every day, emissions regulations are getting stricter, and power companies are continually looking for new ways to increase efficiency, lower their carbon footprint, and still improve reliability, resiliency, and safety. In response, power companies have embarked on digital transformation journeys to create a connected workforce, enable digital twins, and more. But, in the sea of data, are they truly getting the industry-specific insights they need? AVEVA helps power companies realize the value of their data, starting with the right foundation.

Building the foundation for insights

Power companies know that data is the key to overcoming the challenges of our complicated market. Many use AVEVA™ PI System™ to collect, organize, archive, and contextualize data from any source. AVEVA PI System’s powerful and versatile data management capabilities yield excellent ROI on their own. But when companies use them in conjunction with other AVEVA solutions that are tailored to the power industry, they get further insights that help them move at the speed of a rapidly-changing market.

Discover anomalies and take action

AVEVA™ Predictive Analytics helps power companies discover asset anomalies and take action before assets fail. Native integration with AVEVA PI System makes AVEVA Predictive Analytics easy to deploy—and provides even faster ROI. It combines real-time and historical information with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities so users can identify asset anomalies weeks or months before failure. Moreover, users get information on time-to-failure, which they can use to set maintenance priorities. They also receive prescriptive advice so they can take action and remediate problems. With out-of-the-box visualization capabilities, users can view and present data and analyses using easy-to-understand displays.

Power utilities can also integrate asset data with engineering, operations, and other data from both within the organization—such as financial data—and from third-party sources—such as weather data. That wide-scope data integration gives the organization complete end-to-end visualization.

Take a centralized approach

Power generation resources are often geographically distributed, and understanding asset performance requires centralizing both operations and monitoring. AVEVA™ Unified Operations Center offers a broad view of process and infrastructure operations, allowing power generation companies to combine information from many different sources into a single graphical environment. By seamlessly integrating with AVEVA PI System and AVEVA Predictive Analytics, AVEVA Unified Operations Center enables enterprise visualization from one location—giving power companies the tools they need to increase return on investment.

Share data seamlessly

The rapid adoption of distributed energy resources (DER) demands an interconnected electric grid supply chain. To ensure seamless generation, multiple stakeholders need access to multiple different datasets from the power producer. Traditional data-sharing methods raise security concerns, are cumbersome, or require so much time and effort that data becomes stale. As a fully managed cloud-native SaaS solution, AVEVA™ Data Hub allows power utilities to provide secure access to real-time data to users in remote locations or outside the company’s network.