Power Plant 4.0: Embracing next-generation technologies for power plant digitization

Even before the outbreak of COVID-19, fossil-fuel power plants faced significant disruption from renewable energy sources, low gas prices, and ambitious decarbonization goals, all of which are changing customer preferences. Now, as the power-generation industry shifts to the next normal, adopting the latest digital and advanced-analytics technologies has become critical. Many power companies began their digital transformations with technological solutions such as data models, which help optimize set points, enable better dispatch decisions, and support maintenance strategies and operating-mode selection. Forward-thinking companies, however, have recently started using visualization tools to manage real-time generation performance and digital control software to relay predictive data to control rooms. Yet these innovations are grounded in tangibly improving outcomes for plant operations and are therefore only part of a digitally enabled, next-generation power plant (Exhibit 1).