Presentation: The Journey from Historian To Business Intelligence

Scrubgrass Generating produces power in Pennsylvania by burning abandoned coal piles and reclaiming the sites with the ash. When their power purchase agreement ended the plant entered a dynamic pricing merchant operating mode. That mode required the plant know their real time power and production costs. To see those costs the plant needed a single platform that could integrate process, market, and finance data to perform real time cost calculations. The plant was able to leverage their existing PI system to include data from finance and web based pricing to create both a single process/cost database and tools to easily visualize the data. With the support of big data they were able to forecast that the plant would require $1mm - $2mm less maintenance than financial models predicted. This turned the project from a loss to marginal gain and gave ownership a high enough confidence level to continue operation instead of decommissioning the plant.