PI at NB Power

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• PI at NB Power
• Presented by Steve Boyko

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Introduction

• About NB Power
• Our PI history
• Current PI status
• Specific PI applications
• Future PI applications
• Observed benefits
• Conclusions questions

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New Brunswick
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About NB Power

• Founded in 1920
• Provincially owned (crown corporation)
• 2500 employees
• 6,600 km transmission lines
• Serves over 300,000 customers
• Net generation - 4119 MW
• 1.2 billion sales in 1998-1999
• 15 generating stations nuclear, oil,
  Orimulsiontm, coal, gas turbine, hydro

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NB Power Today

• Increasing challenges...
• Transmission deregulation
• Increasing competition

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NB Power Today

• create a need for
• Paying down debt
• Greater efficiencies
• Emphasis on the bottom line

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Deregulation

• Transmission has been partially deregulated
• Generators can sell through or out but not
  in
• Division into business units
• Generation
• Nuclear
• Transmission Distribution
• Customer Service Marketing

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NB Powers PI History

• First PI installation 1992 in new Belledune
  generating station
• PI 2 system provided by Westinghouse
• 20,000 points

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NB Powers PI History

• Bulk tag purchase made in spring 1999 as Year
  2000 replacement and standardization of historian
  platforms
• Four new PI servers installed in summer 1999
• three power plants
• Energy Control Center
• Belledune PI 2 server to be upgraded to PI 3 in
  April 2000

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Current PI Status

• 65,000 tags across five servers
• 87 ProcessBook users
• 76 DataLink users
• Users access servers locally and across our WAN
• Applications growing..

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Specific PI Applications

• Shared ProcessBooks
• Transmission system monitoring
• Opacity monitoring
• Web page captures
• Web applications
• Equipment running hours tracking
• Report scheduling
• Electricity marketing

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Shared ProcessBooks

• Plants and business units have developed their
  own and most share them across our WAN
• General process overviews, trends

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Coleson Cove Unit 2
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Dalhousie Scrubber
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Dalhousie Unit 2 Cycle
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Transmission Monitoring

• NB Power oversees the Maritime Control Area
• Standards for responding to loss of load or
  generation
• NB Power is responsible for maintaining 60 Hz
  frequency on grid
• We adjust the frequency by raising/lowering load
  on units
• PI used to demonstrate compliance, prepare reports

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Frequency Control
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Opacity Monitoring

• Provincial regulations stipulate that our
  Dalhousie plant must report an exceedance if we
  exceed 20 opacity in any 4 minutes of a 20
  minute period
• Very difficult to calculate using DCS
• Many spikes due to rapping
• Solution - PI-API!

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Opacity Monitoring

• NT service written in C
• Runs on PI server
• Tracks opacities for each unit
• Should an exceedance occur, it
• generates a report of opacities during the period
• alarms the unit operator

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Opacity Monitoring
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Web Page Captures

• Our Generation Marketing group requires market
  information to make energy purchases and sales
• Current information is generally available on the
  Internet
• Historical information is either lacking or
  poorly organized
• Solution - put it in PI!

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This...
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becomes this!
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Web Page Captures

• Software written using Visual Basic and PI-API
• Captures web pages at predetermined intervals
• Scans page source for certain strings, e.g.
• Current Cleveland Weather via PI
• Downside - dependent on page format not changing

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OSI DevNet

• The DevNet home page shows the current
  temperature in Cleveland
• Easy to capture and put into PI

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OSI DevNet
ltstronggtltsmallgtCurrent Cleveland Weather via
PIlt/smallgtltbrgtltsmallgtTemp. 39 F
lt/smallgtltsmallgtHumidity 57 lt/smallgtltsmallgtWind
2 MPHlt/smallgtlt/stronggt
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Cleveland Weather in PI
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Web Applications

• Some users require only a snapshot of the process
• DataLink or ProcessBook is overkill
• Solution - Web pages on Intranet via PI-API

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Sample Web Page
Links
More links
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Equipment Running Hours

• Machinery needs periodic maintenance
  (lubrication, vibration testing, etc.)

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Equipment Running Hours

• Done in past with PIM (Periodic Inspection and
  Maintenance) work orders
• Time-consuming
• Manpower-intensive
• Current maintenance done on a running hours basis
• Some equipment not attached to DCS
• Solution - PI with manual entry

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Equipment Running Hours

• Modern plants can calculate running hours from
  DCS points
• Older plants perform manual entry into PI using
  Manual Point Data Entry Control
• Visual Basic program (using PI-API) to extract
  data from PI
• Microsoft Access front-end for users

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Report Scheduling

• Needed automatic report generation solution
• Replacement for ReportWriter and other reporting
  systems
• Want to email reports to save paper
• Solution - Visual Basic and PI-DataLink

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Report Scheduling

• An NT service monitors
• date/time
• digital trigger points
• Loads Excel spreadsheets (with PI-DataLink calls)
• Prints and/or emails them
• Visual Basic front-end for configuration

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Electricity Marketing

• NB Power sells energy to Eastern Canada and into
  the New England power market
• Our Marketing group uses PI to track
• energy prices
• actual sales
• unit availability
• air temperatures
• billing

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Outage Costing

• Unit outages (trips) result in
• increased fuel cost for replacement power
• lost revenue and/or opportunities
• Marketing uses PI to tie lost megawatts and lost
  sales together to put a dollar value on an outage

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Outage Costing

• PI provides critical information
• actual costs of an outage
• cost of restoring unit quickly vs. lost
  revenue/opportunities

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PI Applications

• Shared ProcessBooks
• Transmission system monitoring
• Opacity monitoring
• Web page captures
• Web applications
• Equipment running hours tracking
• Report scheduling
• Electricity marketing
• Use of PI-API, DataLink, ProcessBook

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The Future

• Integration of more stand-alone systems
  (interfaces)
• Performance monitoring
• Investigate other products
• PI-BatchView
• PI-ActiveView
• SAP integration?
• More Internet applications
• More PI servers

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Observed Benefits

• Much more data stored
• Unifies diverse data stores
• Widely accessible
• Faster and easier analysis

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Conclusions

• PI selected as standard historian platform for NB
  Power
• Provides a robust platform on which to build
  applications
• Endless applications...

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Questions