GE Supplying Software To Turkish Power Plant

GE and Gama Energy (Gama) signed an agreement to operate the first digital power plant in Turkey.This deal marks the first use of industrial cloud software applications in a power plant in Turkey to improve efficiency and productivity.

GE will install GAMA’s 840 MW İç Anadolu natural gas combined cycle power plant in the city of Kırıkkale with its advanced digital solutions, Asset Performance Management (APM) and Operations Optimization (OO) solutions using Predix, the operating system for the Industrial Internet. Installation of these digital solutions is planned for the first quarter of 2017.

“We’re proud to be the first digital power plant adopter in Turkey through our collaboration with GE,” said Sıtkı Şerifeken, Gama Energy General Manager. “GE’s enhanced total plant capabilities, advanced digital competencies and our 15 year history together give us great confidence in these new solutions to help us reduce maintenance costs and increase operational efficiency in the plant furthermore.”

The announcement builds upon last year’s multi-year agreement between GE and Gama to provide planned and unplanned maintenance services under availability and performance guarantees for two GE 9F.05 gas turbines and a GE D11 steam turbine, the company said. These services, combined with digital solutions, provide Gama’s plant operators with greater insight to predict and diagnose asset failures with enough lead time to effectively plan maintenance schedules with more reliability while ensuring high availability and a steady revenue flow from power plant operations. As part of the 15-year agreement, GE is deploying its Fleet360 platform of customized plant solutions to help improve performance and extend maintenance intervals.

“Unplanned outages in power plants correspond to 3 to 8% of a plant’s capacity,” said Murat Demirel, GE’s Power Services Eastern Europe and Turkey General Manager. “GE’s APM solution will bring a significant efficiency boost through early detection of such outages at power plants currently using this solution. We estimate these solutions have the potential to save up to US$3 million annually through early detection of outages.”

GE said the APM and OO software applications slated for implementation at GAMA’s power plant can provide numerous operational benefits such as improved reliability and availability via enhanced predictivity, accurate performance monitoring and forecasting capability, dispatch optimization via better visibility into plant capability, and lower production costs and asset generation forecasting capability for improved asset dispatch.

Natural gas has the leading position in power generation with its share of 33% in Turkey. Murat Demirel noted these digital solutions can help yield more plant operational efficiencies associated with limited natural gas resources.