Brian Davis is the man with the power, the SMARTpower, that is. Davis, director of technology at USP&E, took fairly standard power plant control room tracking data and re-engineered it into a web-based monitoring program for power plants that can be viewed anywhere in the world with an Internet connection.
SMARTpower, whose origins began in 2009, is an online fuel efficiency and O&M tool for power generation that USP&E created from scratch.
Its functionalities include metering and showing graphs of instrumentation on the web. The uniqueness of the program lies in its ability to capture the entire operations process including manpower, work orders, spare parts inventory and service schedules.
“There’s a lot of people that will take data and make a chart of it on the web so people can see it,” Davis says. “But we’re actually trying to capture the entire process instead of just using this as a recording tool, you’re actually using it in your work day.” The operators on site are using this program to keep track of day-to-day activities, he added.
A few days ago, USP&E introduced its one of a kind digital monitoring system to London Mining, a client in Sierra Leone. SMARTpower will be used to monitor a power plant in the African village of Marampa that is currently supplying energy to an Iron Ore Mine.
“It’s just a way to see what’s going on in Marampa or here or London or elsewhere.”
This state-of-the-art technology is a secure program that only allows access to those who have a username and password. USP&E employees are given access so that they’re able to enter data into the system, while customers can access the program in a read-only view to monitor plant operations and maintenance in what is almost real-time.
“It’s near real-time with only about an hour delay or so,” Davis says. “We give our customers an unlimited view of it so they can see where their money is going.”
SMARTpower technology can monitor energy output, consumption, and efficiency. If you want to look deeper, you can track temperatures, pressures, RPM as well as the number of engines that have run, which are next in line and the energy trend and capacity of an engine.
“The ability to track your fuel efficiency is really important because if we can improve that number then it’s a direct addition to your bottom line,” he says.
One of SMARTpower’s many perks is that it provides a centralized location to store information rather than keeping track of documents manually or in spreadsheets. For instance, if an operator wants to have a record of something that they’re manually tracking, they can create a file, send it to USP&E and it can be recreated in SMARTpower. Having one place to access documents is helpful for training new employees and also protects important documentation in the event that a computer dies.
“This is where everything is located,” Davis says of SMARTpower, “and that helps us here since we’re half a world away.”
USP&E is a Dallas-based company whose mission is to deliver the most cost effective and efficient Power Station Engineering, Procurement, Construction, Operations and Maintenance Solutions in the strategic growth country marketplace.
For more information about services and offerings, go to http://www.uspowerco.com