Energy Solutions
Monitoring & Diagnostics
Black & Veatch’s PowerPlantMD™ advanced monitoring and diagnostics solution
provides supplemental "support" for power generators to keep their plants
running at peak efficiency and reliability, thereby minimizing CO2 emissions per
MWH. The PowerPlantMD solution encompasses specialized tools and processes to proactively
identify, diagnose and remedy emerging issues before they cause efficiency and reliability
degradation. Black & Veatch currently monitors more than 10,000 MW of generation
from 36 generating units.
Black & Veatch’s PowerPlantMD solution focuses on use of specialized processes
and tools/techniques that transform "reams" of plant data into true knowledge
of performance efficiency or reliability. Most importantly, it facilitates action
needed to remedy such issues. PowerPlantMD addresses CO2 emissions challenges head-on
by identifying efficiency gaps and the means to close them on a day-to-day and hour-by-hour
basis.
At the heart of PowerPlantMD is the Black & Veatch Monitoring & Diagnostics
(M&D) Center. This center was founded in 2001 as a means for helping our power
generation clients take tangible steps toward achieving their evermore challenging
performance and reliability goals.
The M&D Center provides an advanced centralized monitoring function to clients
that are unable to justify the expense of their own M&D Center or need assistance
in putting one together. Core to achieving sustained success is forming an integrated
team comprising the B&V M&D Center staff and a cross-functional action-oriented
team at the plant.
The M&D Center engineers provide anomaly detection based on available real-time
data for all major plant systems from the perspectives of both process efficiency
and equipment health. It doesn’t stop there, as the M&D Center provides the
necessary additional data analysis, problem quantification, actionable recommendations,
and even on-site diagnostics as needed.
Collectively, the M&D Center and the plant team work to determine root cause,
corrective action, and priority. The result is that operations, maintenance, instrument
and control, and performance engineering functions at your plant become more proactive
and focused on the plant"s efficiency and reliability goals. All of these features
greatly enhance a utility’s ability to proactively manage carbon emissions.
The M&D Center is designed to leverage Black & Veatch’s industry-leading
power engineering consulting capabilities and 20+ years of performance monitoring
expertise. This effort has required an investment in M&D Center hardware and
software infrastructure to support high-speed, highly secure, Internet-based connections
to our client’s secure plant data servers. Black & Veatch’s M&D Center has
been applied to 43 units, representing more than 13,000 MW of power generation capacity.