GE Power Systems is pushing an online tool as a means for owners of General Electric gas and steam turbines to better plan their maintenance outages, and so increase their power plants' productivity and profitability.

When turbine operators are planning outages, the tool, called Outage Optimizer, is intended to help evaluate GE service offerings for the equipment, configure paths for improved performance and profitability, gain access to technical documentation, and request and buy proposals online.

"Power companies need to plan their turbine outages from 18 to 24 months in advance to order the specific parts and services they need to upgrade their machines," said Jason Pring, a mechanical engineer and e-business services leader at GE Power Systems in Atlanta.

As Pring described it, "Outage planning used to mean GE clients would have to make a lot of phone calls, send faxes back and forth, and pull notes out of drawers to share information. By contrast, we designed the Outage Optimizer as a collaborative tool so that owners of GE turbines and our field engineers can plan outages together more quickly and accurately."

In May, GE introduced a history function enabling a turbine owner and GE to handle pertinent documents, such as technical drawings and contracts, online.

"The online tool provides more than just generic turbine information," Pring said. "It also provides detailed information on the specific serial numbered GE turbine in the plant."

In addition, the Outage Optimizer allows operators to compare the performance of a specific turbine with that of similar equipment operating anywhere in the world.

The Outage Optimizer includes a review-of-performance improvement package designed to increase turbine output, efficiency, reliability, or availability, as well as to reduce emissions. The online tool is also used to determine how upgrades will improve the output and heat rates of turbines, and calculate the payback based on a specific turbine's operating conditions and changing market economics.

Michael Valenti

Internet Connects San Diego Neighborhood

A San Diego initiative enables residents to log onto the Internet in their homes, even if they don't own computers. The initiative, called the Jefferson Project, is sponsored by the California Energy Commission of Sacramento and the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, Calif. The project is intended to improve consumer awareness of energy conservation, energy efficiency, and energy choices.

The project—which just recently wrapped up a yearlong, 100-home pilot—provides a television remote control or a wireless keyboard to users, who can then navigate the Web by using their television as a monitor, said Craig McAllister, project manager. The leaders behind the project think that energy users who have access to a personal computer and the right Web sites can find useful and cost-saving information. But more than half the residents in any given community don't use computers and many more don't seek out energy conservation information, McAllister said.

The sponsors chose Clairemont, a San Diego neighborhood, for the pilot program because the community is of average size, 35,000, and represents average demographics. Users have access to the Jefferson Project Web site, which contains much local content. Community members with a computer can see a version of the Web site by registering to become members of the project.

"As the number of participants in a networked community increases, the benefits of being connected increases exponentially, with more users sharing more community content," McAllister said. "From the first day, kids were e-mailing their friends and parents were contacting teachers and neighbors. A big advantage of this system is that the family doesn't have to own a PC in order to communicate with their friends."

Jefferson Project participants agreed to participate in a baseline survey and answer six questionnaires over the course of the yearlong pilot program. The questionnaires addressed issues of energy conservation, Internet use, and personal benefits of the program.

Jack Hanzlik, Jefferson Project's director of marketing communications, said project coordinators found from the feedback that people who live in the same neighborhood or who belong to the same organizations are interested in similar issues and seek to communicate about them.

The project coordinators are planning to expand to 15,000 families without computers over the course of the year.

Jean Thilmany

Water Chemistry Goes Online

More than 30 U.S. nuclear plants are using the Internet and a new system to evaluate and monitor water chemistry, said Tina Gaudreau, director of software technologies for EPRI-solutions, the applications subsidiary of Palo Alto-based Electric Power Research Institute. Called Smart ChemWorks, the system collects data from plant instrumentation at each site.

Data are transferred over secure Internet lines to a central server, Gaudreau said. There, Smart ChemWorks runs simulator models and operating scenarios using an artificial intelligence engine. Plant chemists are told immediately of any abnormal conditions in water chemistry. EPRI system engineers monitor the servers and their output continuously.

Water chemistry monitoring can be used to detect leaks in systems, and it can detect loss and overfeed of chemicals, Gaudreau said. By performing checks on in-plant monitors, the EPRI system can determine when those systems are operating below par.

Water chemistry evaluation traditionally is heavily dependent on plant personnel for reducing and analyzing data.

Paul Sharke

Avoiding Power Gridlock

Since 1998, when deregulation really started transforming the power industry, the volume of energy transactions across the power grid has increased significantly, placing a strain on transmission systems.

Although utilities commonly make deals to buy and sell electricity with other utilities or supply power needs to large industrial customers, the practice has increased fourfold over the last few years, estimated Stephen Lee, area manager of grid operations at the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry group based in Palo Alto, Calif. Further complicating matters, the various services of utilities—power plants and distribution and transmission lines—have become unbundled to varying degrees in different states as deregulation is taking effect. Not only are transactions becoming more numerous, but they are involving longer distances.

To cope with these changes, EPRI and the North American Electric Reliability Council, or NERC, an industry group that sets reliability standards for interconnected electric transmission system operations, developed the Interchange Distribution Calculator, an online data processing and communications service to help manage the flow of electricity.

IDC has been operational since October 1999 in the Eastern Interconnection, which includes the eastern portion of the United States and Canada. Lee, who is the EPRI project manager of the NERC IDC Operation Services, believes that the IDC can ensure an orderly and equitable process for eliminating transmission overloads.

Regional transmission organizations, also known as RTOs, are being formed in the United States. They will oversee power transmission in a defined geographic area and ensure open access to the transmission grid. Within these areas, the activity of buying and selling power is a sort of balancing act between security coordinators, who keep an eye on transmission line activity, and marketers, who buy and sell electricity generated by independent power producers. Marketers are not privy to information accessed by security coordinators, and the job functions of each are kept separate.

Energy transactions are normally conducted through what is known as a contract path, which designates points of delivery and receipt as well as intermediate points. However, these transactions may cause congestion on transmission lines of other utilities because electricity flows in parallel paths and not in contract paths. Security coordinators act as gatekeepers, monitoring transmission lines, identifying transactions that are causing congestion, and taking steps to relieve congestion according to NERC rules.

In the Eastern Interconnection, one of the tools that the security coordi-nators use is IDC. The IDC system, which was jointly developed by Open Access Technologies International of Minneapolis and Perot Systems of Dallas, is basically an Internet Web server, operated by a cluster of computer workstations. It examines more than 1,000 interchange transactions at any one time with respect to their impact on 700-plus transmission facilities.

The IDC engine also considers factors of topology of power lines, transformers, and generators when computing a list of transactions to be curtailed in priority order, if necessary, to eliminate overloading. It uses the NERC electronic transaction tagging system, or E-tag, to track interchange transactions and supports NERC policy on transmission curtailment procedures. These data are continuously submitted to the IDC computer workstations. The IDC system also provides a computer model of the entire Eastern Interconnection and calculates the effects of transactions on the power grid.

Transactions are prioritized according to rules set by NERC. Once the IDC system determines curtailment priorities, security coordinators in the affected control areas implement any necessary curtailments, and handle system reloading when the congestion diminishes. Marketers who are affected would have to find other means of fulfilling their contractual obligations, perhaps by arranging to send the power differential from another source.

In a new development, marketers will be able to evaluate the current congestion status of various bottleneck areas and avoid curtailment.

John DeGaspari

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