General Electric Co. is letting no grass grow under the feet of its Predix platform-as-a-service for the industrial Internet of Things.

After recently signing a deal to test its instrumentation software at Invenergy LLC following the earlier acquisition of two data intelligence startups, the company said Monday it’s expanding its power and utility portfolio to connect energy traders with real-time data flowing in from power-generating equipment.

The need to balance pricing with production is growing as the use of renewable sources is pressuring power producers and distributors to respond more quickly to short-term trading opportunities and to balance capacity across a range of generation sources, including gas, diesel, nuclear, solar, wind and hydro.

GE’s Digital Utility software analyzes data from electricity generation, distribution and transmission assets to enhance equipment efficiency and now to optimize pricing. “We’re now trading based not just on the capacity of the power plant but real information that enables customer to get more capacity out of what they have today,” said Ganesh Bell, chief digital officer of GE Power.

$1.3 trillion opportunity

The World Economic Forum has estimated that by improving equipment utilization and optimizing pricing, the electricity industry can realize up to $1.3 trillion in savings and revenues over the next decade. Bell estimated that asset optimization alone can result in $38 billion in cost savings and added revenue. Three-quarters of equipment breakdowns can be avoided, and up to 8 percent of generated electricity never gets to the consumer because of loss in the grid, he estimated.

Yet most energy companies still function much like they did in the 1970s. “The data today isn’t real-time and the process is done through phone calls,” Bell said. “Energy is the least digitally mature market with the most opportunity.”

GE aims to cash in on the digital transformation of the electricity industry with deals like one it signed with the New York Power Authority last year and acquisitions of companies like NeuCo Inc., which makes data analytics software for improving fossil-fuel-fired power plants. The NYPA will invest $1.1 billion to improve efficiency and incorporate renewable sources with the expectation of yielding $2.25 billion in efficiencies over the next 10 years.

New services and features announced this week include the following.

• Business Optimization provides for real-time communication between trading and plant operations to inform the entire bid-to-bill process. The application alerts power generators of  profitable trading opportunities – often short-term ones – and suggests what the utility can bid into the market. Utilities can thus engage in new profit pools, such as the market for ancillary services to help manage grid stability, and new market opportunities like cross-border trading.
• Updates to GE’s Operations Optimization application help utilities understand where to invest resources to improve flexibility, efficiency, capacity, availability and emissions. Updates include the ability to measure delivery against performance targets, recommendations on how to better meet targets and closed-loop feedback technology for improving performance.
• The company also introduced a single dashboard view of asset health across its Electricity Value Network, which instruments the entire power generation and delivery process based upon GE’s “digital twin” concept. A digital twin is a virtual version of physical assets that can be used for testing and discovery. The Asset Performance Management dashboard provides access to an analytics catalog based on more than 125 million hours of machine operating data that covers 70 percent of all likely failure modes for combined-cycle plants. The dashboard also provides a closed-loop system for dispatching field service technicians and completing operations and maintenance tasks.

GE’s new services are cloud-based and independent of the company’s industrial machinery. Local controllers consisting of X86-based Linux devices can fine-tune equipment using instructions from the cloud platform. GE didn’t announce pricing, which is set on a per-customer subscription basis.

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