Enable a risk-based asset strategy with predictive analytics
Customer Challenges
In today’s energy market, a hydropower operator such as BKK faces multiple challenges, including increasing pressure on power prices and new operating patterns due to the rise of intermittent renewable energy sources such as wind and solar and with the increasing effects of climate change. Additionally, tighter regulations, aging assets, and workforce turnover create more complex operating cost environments
To address these challenges, BKK has launched an ambitious digital transformation program in partnership with GE Renewable Energy. The goal is to reduce the costs of both corrective and preventive maintenance across its plants, to increase the lifetime of individual components while managing risks, and to avoid production losses due to forced and planned outages. Complementarily, BKK is also looking at increasing the flexibility and agility of its organization to adapt faster to a changing environment and to react efficiently to crises
The project is expected to provide significant annual benefits with increased profitability by reducing planned maintenance, postponing investments and increasing revenues as a result of reduced downtime.
GE Renewable Energy’s Hydro Solutions
Targeting a 20% reduction in operating costs, BKK will leverage the full GE APM portfolio to transform its Operations & Maintenance (O&M) practices.
GE Renewable Energy Hydro Digital team connects and streams data from the BKK central data repository to GE’s cloud-based Predix APM solution.
The APM Strategy and APM Health modules are being used to
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develop an assessment of failure risks,
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define the right mitigation actions with respect to each risk,
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evaluate the overall health of the hydro assets based on all available data, and
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enable a continuous improvement loop
Following a detailed sensor and data collection system audit and targeted upgrade, BKK will deploy the APM Reliability module to monitor the performance of BKK’s critical hydropower assets to provide early insights into impending equipment failures and facilitate pre-emptive action. BKK targets cost reductions that total up to 20% of its maintenance operational expenditures.
BKK will also benefit from GE’s Premier Acceleration Plan, which features General Technical Support at a global scale and Education & Training Services. Furthermore with GE’s remote Monitoring & Diagnostics services, a GE team will support BKK in analyzing alerts, providing O&M advisories as well as deep expertise for the most difficult cases.