Responsible for monitoring the health and performance of renewable energy. Assets including solar, wind, gas and batteries.
Southern Company is an American gas and electric utility holding company based in the southern United States. It is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, with executive offices also located in Birmingham, Alabama.
The company is the second largest utility company in the U.S. in terms of customer base, as of 2021. Through its subsidiaries it serves 9 million gas and electric utility customers in 6 states. Southern Company's regulated regional electric utilities serve a 120,000-square-mile (310,000 km2) territory with 27,000 miles (43,000 km) of distribution lines.
Southern Company is one of the largest energy providers in the United States and is ranked 126th on the Fortune 500 listing of the largest U.S. corporations. The company has approximately 31,300 employees. It has more than 500,000 shareholders (NYSE: SO) and has been traded since September 30, 1949.
Southern Company subsidiaries are operating or developing renewable: solar, wind, and biomass facilities across the U.S., as well as the first new nuclear units in the U.S. in 30 years at Plant Vogtle near Augusta, Georgia.
Goals
- Maximize the availability of renewable power generation assets across 400MW of solar, 2500MW of wind, 7400MW of gas, three battery assets totaling 650MWh, and two Bloom fuel cells totaling 27MW.
- Rapid scaling of renewable assets with maximum reliability in approximately 4 months.
Challenges
- Accelerate the development and deployment of predictive models to support renewable generation assets.
- Develop a solar and wind asset monitoring strategy based on inverter temperatures, GSU bushings, and medium voltage transformers.
Solutions
- AVEVA™ PI System
- AVEVA™ Predictive Analytics
Results
- Combine PI Asset Framework for renewables fleet and have built over 2700 models for solar and wind asset health monitoring.
- 134 catches in 10 months resulting in a savings of $747K.
“With the automated model builder capabilities, we’re able to build roughly 20 predictive models in about 2 minutes. The scale of being able to do that has helped us accelerate our ability to support renewables in a way that we couldn’t before.”
Keith Dickey, Renewables Performance Team Leader, Southern Power