Is APM Performance Intelligence the Right Heat Rate Solution for Your Plant?

Managing heat rate can be critical for a thermal plant to maintain a competitive position in your market. By reducing fuel use and heat rate, companies may also inherently reduce their plant’s emissions from fossil fuel generation – helping them reach important energy transition milestones.
 
Read on to see how Performance Intelligence is designed to help power plant engineers operationalize heat rate management, which can reduce time to fix performance issues and help enable you to deliver more reliable, cost-effective power.

Companies with power assets that have heat rates higher than expected for their technology or are worried about hidden issues that are draining plant performance, Performance Intelligence can help operationalize heat rate management to replace manual processes and identify performance issues.

Additionally, if they have an in-house solution that is time consuming, manual, or modeling intensive, Performance Intelligence may be a great addition to their heat rate management program to help improve productivity and find issues faster.

Traditional methods to improve heat rate can involve large capital investments or longer-term O&M strategies using time-based maintenance. Performance Intelligence software is designed to use physics-based performance models to help empower plant teams to more quickly identify performance degradation issues and the optimal timing for addressing them based on plant financials. The models, developed by GE Vernova performance engineers, are tuned to equipment design data and validated with as-running data from the site.

Performance Intelligence is designed as a near real-time thermal monitoring software that uses physics-based digital twins designed to help maintain plant entitlement. A validating process across different operating loads helps to ensure these models represent a digital replica of the plant, providing performance insights even at part loads. 
 
The software is designed to give performance alerts with actionable recommendations, as well as insights to plan maintenance at a more economically advantageous time.

Performance Intelligence is designed with 50 plus alerts and recommendations for BOP, Condenser, CT, ST, and HRSG. When a performance issue is detected, the software will send an alert. If you are familiar with SmartSignal predictive analytics software, the alerts are similar. If you are a GE Vernova Asset Performance Management (APM) customer, you will receive the alerts on the same screen and in the dashboard, they can be ranked by severity, and they include the same functionalities to analyze data or create a case directly from the alert. To assess the impact the degradation is having on the asset, and when the best time would be to address the issue, Performance Intelligence also includes features such as What-If scenario modeling and Economic Tradeoff Advisors.

Performance Intelligence can be integrated with GE Vernova’s APM Reliability and SmartSignal for a holistic problem-solving solution for thermal plants. Combine advanced thermal modeling to manage heat rate with predictive analytics for your generating assets to understand when to implement O&M strategies to avoid unplanned downtime. In one interface, receive consolidated data and diagnostics, including automated alerts of performance shortfalls, and asset alerts to avoid downtime and critical events.
 
Go through this self-guided demo to see how Performance Intelligence with APM Reliability can help meet your plant performance and economic goals.

Companies that operationalize heat rate using GE Vernova’s Performance Intelligence technology have potential to reduce heat rate by up to 1% in 12 months from the first day of deployment.  
 
Check out how much value your company can realize with a 0.5% reduction in heat rate with our Value Calculator.