POWER January 2016 - 26

2016 INDUSTRY FORECAST
Cycling
Big Data and the Industrial
Internet Meet the Power Plant
For several years now, deriving value from " big data " has been a
concern for executives focused on the distribution side of electric
utilities. It was only a matter of time before generating units and
fleets also had the capability to collect, analyze, and act upon huge
volumes of near-real-time data. That time has come.
Gail Reitenbach, PhD
A
nother megatrend has hit the power
generation industry: the Internet of
Things (IoT)-countless devices with
embedded electronics, sensors, and connectivity
to digitally communicate with one another
and their human owners. The IoT generates
more data than most asset owners can warehouse
on their own-hence the moniker " big
data " -and requires sophisticated analytics
(see the sidebar " What's Analytics? " ) in order
to derive benefits from that data. It also often
involves " the cloud " -broadly speaking,
Internet-connected nonlocal data centers and
computing services provided by third parties.
When applied to the power industry, the
preferred buzzword is becoming the Industrial
Internet of Things (IIoT), in recognition
that industrial data feeds can account for more
data, at higher volumes, and with more critical
implications than data from the consumer IoT,
which consists of everything from merchant
payment processing to fitness wristband data.
When a new trend or technology hits an industry,
you can be sure that just about everyone
jumps on the bandwagon. Over the past
few months, pitches and press releases about
the IoT have proliferated in POWER's inbox.
Some of the flurry, I suspect, is in response
to General Electric's (GE's) late September
2015 introduction of its Digital Power Plant
and its broader Industrial Internet platform,
Predix. More on those later. POWER isn't in
a position to provide due diligence evaluations
of vendors' claims, but we can give you
a sense of the evolving landscape.
Data All Along the Wire
For several years, I've been wondering when
entities at the generation end of the electricity
industry would be swept into the " big data
analytics " movement, because those capabilities
have created buzz in the customer service
and grid management sectors for some time.
Companies including IBM, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft,
Google, SAP, Oracle, Verizon, and
26
many others have been promoting their capabilities
around managing data from
the IoT, including the power grid.
In late October 2015, a Greentech
Media article claimed
that there are " more than
1 billion data points
being logged every
day in the U.S.
alone through smart
electric meters. "
Yet, those meters
are sending interval
(rather than continuous)
data feeds,
and action based
on the information
derived from that
data usually need
not be taken immediately.
On the
generation end of
the wire, there are
fewer devices, yet
they are potentially capable
of generating far more data, continuously, that
could enable near-real-time decision-making
with significant consequence.
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Equipment MonitoringRisk Management
From Big Data to Huge Data
Even when compared with the big data being
amassed by utilities on the distribution side,
the potential data volume from complex industrial
systems like power plants, which often
generate information every minute of the
year, is some orders of magnitude larger.
At an industry summit in May 2015, Harel
Kodesh, CTO of GE Software, emphasized
the difference between the Internet we're all
familiar with and the Industrial Internet his
company sees developing: " When you realize
the intensity and volume of data-petabytes
and petabytes-it dwarfs the consumer
Internet. " At GE's September 2015 Minds +
Machines (M+M) event in San Francisco,
www.powermag.com
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multiple speakers claimed that less than 2%
of industrial plant data is actually used.
Introducing the Industrial Internet
Both the potential volume of machine-generated
data and the need for more-secure
management of it are leading to development
of the IIoT-what you might think of as a
special sector of the Internet.
The IoT generally refers to devices on
the consumer side-from fitness wristbands
to Nest thermostats-that can talk to the
Internet through wired connections or wirelessly
and can update automatically. The
IIoT involves similar principles but is, as GE
Digital's Chief Digital Officer Bill Ruh said
at M+M, the Internet of " really important
things-machines that matter. " The scale of
data is daunting: By 2020, Ruh predicted,
106 terabytes of information per day would
be generated by GE machines. (That includes
POWER | January 2016
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POWER January 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of POWER January 2016
