WHITE PLAINS, NY -- The New York Power Authority is investing $1.1 billion to improve efficiency and help ready the state’s power grid to increase energy production from more renewable sources, said Gil Quiniones, NYPA chief executive, in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
The NYPA, which operates 16 generation facilities throughout the state, will use GE asset performance management software at its White Plains headquarters to regularly analyze the health of all its plants and generators, eventually. The new system will begin reviewing operational data from 600 machines throughout its suite of facilities, once up and running. NYPA will embed sensors in machines like power turbines, transmission lines and equipment and generators and pull data from existing enterprise management systems and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), according to Green Tech Media.
Now instead of replacing equipment based on what the manual says, we can replace equipment based on the actual health of the part,” Quiniones said.
The system will not only better manage power assets on the day-to-day, but reduce unplanned service outages. Digital modeling will allow NYPA to predict when its equipment is likely to fail. The total investment is expected to yield $2.25 billion in efficiencies over a 10-year period.
According to WSJ, NYPA generates more than 20 percent of New York state’s electricity, provides power for all government customers in New York City and Westchester County and sells power through investor utilities and smaller cooperatives.
Some believe that New York’s power policy requiring all power utilities to get half of their electricity from renewables by 2030, and 80 percent by 2050, and the state’s power industry practices are at odds. An August opinion piece in the Rochester City Newspaper cited groups that want state government to halt the expansion of New York’s fossil fuel infrastructure. The article pointed to 650-megawatt and 1,000-megawatt natural gas plants about the be constructed. The new power will require tie in to some NYPA transmission lines.
Overall, the source of most New York electricity generation, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, is natural gas. Moreover, the New York Independent System Operator 2016 Power Trends report indicated that “natural gas and dual-fuel projects account for more than 70 percent of the proposed generating capacity being studied by the NYISO for interconnection to the grid.”
While just 23 percent of New York’s electricity was produced by renewable resources in 2015, according to NYISO, that includes NYPA’s vast hydropower facility, the Niagara Project. NYPA reported in 2015 that along with smaller hydropower facilities, hydropower renewables generates 70 percent of its mix.
Some of the hold up in tracking toward the state’s overall power goals, which some call aggressive, seems to be grid-based.
In its Strategic Vision through 2019, NYPA noted that wind farms and solar plants are being built, but generate power in a more intermittent manner than hydropower and other base-load generators like dual-fuel, natural gas and nuclear plants, and require grid adaptation.
Use of the GE asset management performance software, called the Predix platform, has the potential to play a role in predictive analytics of grid assets. Once rolled out to all facilities, NYPA can use the system to better understand how much capacity it has left on critical transmission lines when upstate wind power is peaking, for example.
