2017 Mind and Machines | GE Drives Remote Monitoring Solutions for Utilities

GE's digital twin technology is starting to roll out to new large utilities, such as the New York Power Authority.

GE is a company in transition, stripping away its legacy as a hardware manufacturer to a software/platform company that sees a big future with remote monitoring (see video below) in many industries, such as energy, healthcare,  industrial manufacturing and many others. At last year’s GE Minds and Machines 2016 conference, the company stressed the transition to software and this year’s event — late October 2017 — was clearly centered on Predix Platform and applications outside of the company.

The utilities/power industry is in great flux, as new energy sources and technologies are causing regulators to examine and provide rules to the industry on new processes, such as energy signals and integration issues. GE has been moving quickly with its Predix Platform over the last 4 years and is probably ahead of the regulators to some degree, as the company has been modeling — digital twin — their own power assets as a benchmark for their remote monitoring solution — includes SmarSignal.

In his opening keynote at the Minds and Machine 2017 event, John Flannery, ceo of GE says,”We need to build an integrated ecosystem, one that’s made up of machines, but people, software, supply chains and totally integrated. Improving customer outcomes is the ultimate scorecard, really, and it’s the only scorecard of the future.”

Outcomes is a bit of a buzzword for IIoT, but as my interview with Joe Barkai (Podcast) last year illustrated, new monitoring platforms are providing companies like Duke Power a new revenue stream via maintenance service offerings. The recent Duke Power article shows how Duke Energy Renewables uses Sentient Science’s DigitalClone Live software to diagnose gearbox failures and identify corrective actions for wind turbines. The software helps predict when cracks will appear in the microstructure of rotating mechanical components.

In the video above, the Colin J. Parris, vp of software research at GE Global Research Center, provides a look at how condition monitoring works today at power plants and how a central monitoring approach is possible with large-scale solutions, such as Predix.