One of the highlights of attending the Ovation Users’ Group is getting to hear the experience of a wide variety of Emerson customers, whose experience and insights help users with less experience in a given area run their operations more efficiently and effectively.
In 2024, one of those customers sharing his story was Joel Erwin from Vistra. As Vistra expands its renewables portfolio to meet the new energy economy, its engineers, operators, and technicians are learning many key lessons, many of which Joel was kind enough to share with the Ovation Users’ Group attendees. Joel shared that he has a long history in coal, and he, like many others is having to unlearn many things in renewables—especially with projects.
New technology means more data
Renewables and fossil are very different, as Joel explained,
“You cannot approach renewables projects with a fossil mindset…At an old fossil plant you might have 20 Ovation controllers, with 3,000 hardwired I/O, and a bunch of servers. You get to a renewables site, and you’ve got one server and one OCR pair, and a whole bunch of data lakes.”
And he’d know. At one Vistra site, they’re managing millions of tags. That massive number of tags generates an even more massive amount of data—so much that the team could never hope to analyze it manually. While Vistra’s massive data pool may be uncommon in the industry today, it won’t be for long. As more and more producers expand their renewables offerings, they too will need to find ways to use enormous datasets.
This kind of work is what AI is designed for, and why Emerson is working GenAI into Ovation software. With AI tools, power producers can follow trends and perform analytics on massive datasets in very little time, making it possible to track, trend, and improve performance, even as the number of tags scales and data expands.
Designing for visibility
Even with AI, a key challenge remains: getting the data out of silos and moving it around. Doing so not only takes massive networking and bandwidth capacity to move data, keep it fault tolerant, and historize it, but even more importantly, requires data be put in front of people in a way that is easy to consume and understand.
Ovation Green SCADA lends itself well to this kind of data management. The software was built with a Boundless Automation vision in mind—prioritizing the elimination of silos and increasing data mobility across the enterprise. Ovation Green SCADA can manage vast amounts of data and can bring it into usable, understandable, decision-making graphics for operators to consume on site, or even hundreds of miles away at a remote operations center.
Consistency is key
Joel also stressed that Vistra expends effort to deliver a similar look and feel between operations. Consistency, he explained, can help bring people up to speed more quickly. However,
“It takes a concerted effort to try to provide guidance so you end up with a similar look and feel.”
Ovation Green SCADA can offer that consistency across the fleet. Because the software can bring in data from a wide variety of renewables controls and aggregate it in a single, unified display, operators of any experience level can quickly gain situational awareness and make the best decisions about their operations and maintenance.
Better together
Success in modern power generation is not just about tools and technology, however. One key strategy that Joel shared is that working together with a trusted automation partner is key. When Vistra and Emerson work closely together, he explained, Vistra gets the project and operations outcomes it wants, and Emerson improves its project execution and support to help it reach more customers. As the face of the power industry continues to change, collaboration is key to ensuring everyone rises together.
There has already been so much insight and the Ovation Users’ Group has only just begun. If you’re not joining the excitement in Pittsburgh, stay tuned to the Emerson Automation Experts channel for regular updates throughout the week!
The post Keeping up with the Evolution of Renewables appeared first on the Emerson Automation Experts blog.