GE Power president and CEO Steve Bolze
The uptime and efficiency of South Africa’s existing power stations could be substantially improved through the integration of new digital software solutions and data analytics, the global president and CEO of GE Power asserts.
Speaking to Engineering News Online during a visit to South Africa, Steve Bolze highlighted that 70% of South Africa’s electricity was currently being generated using GE technology – this, following the US group’s $9.5-billion acquisition of Alstom’s power business in late 2015.
“We now really have a unique opportunity to work with our customers here in South Africa on improving the performance of the existing assets,” he said.
The group was ready and willing to “prototype” its digital offerings (dubbed by some as the ‘the Internet of big things’) on specific domestic plants, as it was already doing internationally.
“To put it in context, there is some 45 GW of power in South Africa and 30 GW is from GE technology. If we can get 10% more performance out of the existing assets, that’s 3 GW of new power.”
Eskom was already prioritising the restoration of the energy availability factor (EAF) associated with its coal-fired power stations, many of which were performing well below capacity in recent years, owing to a combination of maintenance backlogs, poor fuel management and unplanned breakdowns.
During 2015, the EAF associated with Eskom’s coal-fired power stations fell to well below the group’s 80% target, resulting in periods of load-shedding, as well as a far higher use of the State-owned utility’s expensive diesel-fuelled open-cycle gas turbines than had been budgeted.
“Obviously with the focus on costs here and the focus of uptime and power stability, we think we have some real opportunities to support our customers to just get more out of their exiting assets.”
GE had been investing heavily in the so-called industrial Internet, with the aim of connecting machines, such as power turbines, and big data to improve operating efficiencies.
Bolze reported that he could already point to a number of examples globally where such hardware and software integration was resulting in improved plant performance.
GE had an installed base of more than 1 500 GW globally and had calculated that a 1% improvement in the performance of it gas-turbine assets alone would yield yearly fuel savings of close to $5-billion. “Now South Africa is heavily coal based, but there’s a big opportunity here to achieve coal savings, or relative emissions reductions.”
He stressed, too, that GE Power was investing in South Africa and Africa, where it already had 2 600 employees and the unit was intent on replicating the localisaiton progress that had already been made by GE Transportation, which had raised the local content of diesel locomotives being sold to Transnet to 55%.
“With the Alstom acquisition, we are a much broader partner to the South African power industry,” he said, reporting that Africa represented $4-billion in yearly revenues and was growing “in the double digits”.
“We already have over $1-billion of local sourcing and we are looking to expand our presence here, not only through sourcing, but also in terms of support for small and medium-sized business enterprises.”