The power industry is facing the biggest transformation in its long and proud history. The secure digitalization of power generation assets — new and old, renewable and thermal — is right at the heart of an accelerated decarbonization of our energy system.
Research from McKinsey & Company suggests that through rigorous end-to-end digitalization (and data orientation), thermal power plants can realize an additional EBITDA potential of 20 to 30%.[1] Thermal plants face significant cost pressure because of renewables and rising emission costs.
These EBITDA improvements are also available for renewable generation, especially offshore and onshore wind. The strong growth of renewables, guaranteed offtake prices, a focus on hardware engineering, and the relatively short history of large-scale renewable generation are root causes of untapped profitability potential.
According to the research, even sophisticated generation players in thermal (and renewables) have only implemented isolated digital use cases, lacking significant P&L impact or failing to change the way of working rigorously. The business case for digitization also supports decarbonization goals: digitization can accelerate the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from thermal plants.
What is a “digital power plant”?
Digital power plants are fully data-centric power generation facilities (renewable and thermal) that leverage advanced software, technologies, and AI to (1) reduce operations and maintenance cost; (2) improve power output and increase asset flexibility; and (3) increase HSSE (health, safety, security, environment) performance.
They integrate a broad spectrum of technologies: existing and new sensor technologies, OT and IIoT devices, AI, mobile and augmented reality devices, drones, robots, and more. The data and information generated is used to improve the planning, monitoring, and control of all aspects of generation assets. A digital power plant is operational and workflow-oriented. There are overlaps with the “digital twin” concept, but it is more holistic.
The digital power plant and the control room
A key facility of any generation plant, renewable or thermal, is the control room. Operators use this 24/7 facility to ensure the smooth and safe performance of the plant. The control room aggregates all relevant OT and IT data and information and facilitates real-time monitoring and decision-making. It should be the central starting point for an end-to-end digital power plant journey.
Control rooms are sensitive from both a physical and a digital security perspective. That is an additional advantage, because a digital power plant program also becomes an opportunity to harden existing security mechanisms — which is required, because the status quo is constantly challenged by attackers and new threats keep emerging.
New security technologies and data innovations make it possible to use operational systems (OT), control rooms and legacy IT infrastructure for an end-to-end digital transformation towards the digital power plant, including raising current data and cyber security levels. But how can this be implemented?
A “virtual operations center” for generation assets
Planning and implementing a virtual operations center for generation assets operationalizes the end-to-end digital transformation, in both renewables and thermal. It is a digital addition to the existing systems and control rooms that supports and implements the digital power plant. It enables a broad range of benefits:
- Better day-to-day control room work: remote steering, less paperwork, optimized inspection rounds, better performance observation, and consolidating multiple assets during nighttime.
- Data-driven maintenance planning: easier use of AI for predictive maintenance, sequencing of maintenance work, spare-part and workflow management, and more.
- Better overall plant management: real-time asset views, financial impact, people management, consolidated views, and more.
- “AI readiness”: reducing the time-to-AI. Access to data is key to digitizing and introducing AI — and access to data outside the generation asset is often impossible because of security concerns and air-gapping. A virtual operations center solves this because it is based on virtualized data.
- Tracking decarbonization performance: real-time tracking of plant emissions (thermal) and a full audit of data streams.
- Vendor-agnostic portfolio overview: data from heterogeneous hardware and software environments (multiple vendors) is unlocked, and different plants and fleets can be aggregated for reporting and steering.
How does the technology work?
The required software layer — a secure and governed data abstraction layer — sits on top of all existing and new OT/IT data infrastructure. It enables generators to use data from the generation asset plus data from additional internal and external sources (e.g. energy market data, hardware vendor data, maintenance data, AI) in a highly secure, governed and trusted way. This includes blending data from different sources and creating new virtual data sets that feed new AI algorithms or can be used for visualization and performance analysis.
This approach overcomes the security concerns stemming from OT/IT convergence (moving OT data into IT and sending commands and data back from IT to OT). It does not require moving data around, building new IT infrastructure, or copying large amounts of generation asset data into new data repositories.
What are the future challenges for plant operators?
Security challenges
Generation assets are an attractive target for hackers and malicious actors because they are critical infrastructure — a long-standing, key risk. One security strategy is air-gapping (isolating the OT and control room), and there are others. A recent conversation with the CEO of a very large generation company revealed that this had worked so far — until they recently suffered an attack. The hacker came in via a hardware vendor who was connected to the control room. There is no doubt that additional security concepts and technologies need to be deployed in power generation.
Flexibility challenges
Another problem is the use of proprietary operational data collection, storage, and analysis systems in power generation. These systems can prevent digital power plants from emerging, because they lock up data and make it hard for generation companies to access it and develop additional use cases. Their cost and high vendor lock-in potential are further disadvantages. Heterogeneous generation equipment from different vendors across larger asset portfolios adds to the challenge: it comes with proprietary data and security systems, raising the question of how to manage the portfolio holistically and create synergies.
Solutions
The proposed concepts are a great opportunity to address data security and flexibility and to improve overall data and cyber security. Managing and securing the vast amounts of real-time data generated by plants of all kinds — and integrating older legacy systems — is a significant project. Air-gapping has already proven insufficient as a security strategy. Pursuing end-to-end digitization means reviewing all security-related aspects of operations and challenging their future-readiness. This can also include crypto-agility: what does the emergence of quantum computers mean for data and cyber security?
New technologies and innovation
The security and flexibility challenges can be addressed with new technologies emerging right now. These are based on zero-trust security models that reduce the potential attack surface (e.g. Explicit Private Networking, XPN). Unlocking data for additional use cases is the core objective and added value of governed data virtualization. The combination of both delivers end-to-end data security and robustness from the generation sensor or device all the way to the AI.
The challenges that technology cannot solve for generation companies are cultural — and access to a workforce familiar with modern OT and IT technologies. Power generation has a long tradition and a strong engineering culture that is not software-led. Similar issues can be observed in other industries such as automotive, where software has become a key element of the value proposition. The same will happen in generation over time.
References
[1] McKinsey & Company, The digital power plant of the future. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/electric-power-and-natural-gas/our-insights/the-digital-power-plant-of-the-future