New GE Predix Software for Power Producers and Utilities Breaks Down Barriers between Operations and Commercial Silos to Drive New Profit Opportunities

‘Business Optimization’ Software Puts Real-Time Generating Capacity
and Grid Availability Information at Traders’ Fingertips to Enhance
Financial Decision Making

SAN RAMON, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–GE (NYSE:GE) today launched an expanded suite of Predix*-based
software applications that harness the power of the Industrial IoT to
drive new profit opportunities for power producers and utilities. The
new ‘Digital Utility’ solutions connect energy traders with valuable,
real-time plant productivity and capacity data to enable more
profitable, analytics-informed trading.

Additional new offerings unveiled today include the Baseline Security
Center to increase operational security for power producers, and
services designed to help utilities plan for a digital transformation.

“Today we are expanding GE’s software beyond the machine to the
business, putting greater profitability in reach for our customers,”
said Ganesh Bell, Chief Digital Officer, GE Power. “The ‘Digital
Utility’ suite will break down barriers between commercial and
operational teams and ensure that decisions are made with full insight
into real-time information.”

GE’s ‘Digital Utility’ solutions are designed to help electricity
businesses navigate rapidly changing markets. Low demand growth, falling
wholesale power prices, excess capacity from the growth of renewable
energy sources, and long-term investments in thermal generation are
greatly impacting power and utility businesses’ profitability.

Last year, 86 percent of new energy capacity added in the European Union
came from renewable sources. The preference for, and intermittency of,
those resources is dramatically changing the role of traditional fuels,
and led European utilities to spend more than €1 billion on grid
balancing services. The trend is likely to repeat itself globally with
138.5 GW of renewable power capacity added worldwide in 2016.

For energy businesses across the Electricity
Value Network (EVN), remaining profitable means responding quickly
to short-term trading opportunities, maximizing capacity for peak demand
periods, and strategically planning to address long-term supply and
demand trends. That requires traditional fuel types to respond quickly
and flexibly to demand and supply fluctuations.

GE’s Digital Utility software suite serves these needs, connecting data
from electricity generation, distribution and transmission assets to
enable more informed financial decision making. The software suite
leverages more than 100,000 GE
Digital Twins across energy to deliver insights about efficiency,
capacity, emissions, flexibility, and availability that traders can use
to bid with confidence in long-term, day-ahead, and short-term markets.

Announcements in detail:

With the ‘Digital Utility,’ GE is announcing updates and new
capabilities across the entire Predix-based suite of applications for
energy, including:

• Business
  Optimization for more profitable trading – GE’s new
  Business Optimization application enables real-time communication
  between trading and operations to conduct the entire bid to bill
  process. The Business Optimization application alerts a generation
  business of profitable trading opportunities – often highly profitable
  short-term opportunities – and informs what the utility can bid into
  market. The application allows utilities to engage in new profit
  pools, such as the market for ancillary services to help manage grid
  stability, and new market opportunities, such as cross-border trading.
  Deployed as a full stack, the Asset Performance Management, Operations
  Optimization, and Business Optimization applications connect machine
  and operations data with a utility’s bottom line.
• Updates to GE’s Operations
  Optimization application – GE’s Operations Optimization
  offers real-time visibility into plant and fleet-wide performance.
  Enabled by edge-to-cloud technology that allows for fast analytics,
  Operations Optimization helps power generation and utilities
  businesses improve flexibility, efficiency, capacity, availability,
  and emissions. Updates announced today will help utilities understand
  where to invest time and resources to improve these measures. New
  capabilities include the ability to measure delivery against
  performance targets, recommendations on how to better meet targets,
  and closed feedback technology that will help utilities make changes
  and improve performance.
• GE delivers Asset
  Performance Management (APM) across the Electricity Value
  Network (EVN) – Today, GE is introducing a single dashboard view
  of asset health across the entire EVN, including renewables,
  traditional power and grid. Drawing on GE’s Digital Twin technology
  and an analytics catalogue based on more than 125 million hours of
  machine operating data, APM covers 70 percent of all NERC failure
  modes for combined-cycle plants.
• GE announces Digital Worker Capabilities – As part of the APM
  dashboard, work orders will connect with field service technicians to
  dispatch and provide information for operations and maintenance.
  Workers can submit completed Operations & Maintenance (O&M)
  information back into the system, closing a full loop from problem
  identification to resolution. This field service data makes the APM
  application more intelligent with each work order and enables better
  analytics with each alert.
• New GE Baseline
  Security Center (BSC) for Power & Utilities–More than 60
  percent of power leaders believe their security strategy is not
  aligned with today’s risk environment. Many utilities struggle to
  maintain current versions of software or to run the latest security
  “patches” from vendors. GE’s new Baseline Security Center offers a set
  of tools, configurations, and services focused on reducing
  cybersecurity risk across the EVN. Based on recommendations from the
  Center for Internet Security, GE’s Baseline Security Center offers
  services including patch management, anti-malware, identity
  management, network and host hardening, and intrusion detection.
• New Digital Services for Power and Utilities– GE today
  introduced three new types of services to help power producers and
  utilities develop digital strategies. New Digital Transformation
  Services include Digital Visioning workshops, a Digital Effectiveness
  Assessment, Business Value Engineering, and Digital Transformation
  Mapping. New Digital Plant Services provide digital subject matter
  experts to help customers implement recommendations drawn from the
  Digital Transformation process. New Tiered Support Services provide
  customers different levels of support tied to their ongoing use of
  GE’s Business Optimization, Operations Optimization, and Asset
  Performance Management software applications.

About GE Digital

GE Digital connects streams of machine data to powerful analytics,
providing Industrial companies with valuable insights to manage assets
and operations more efficiently. World-class talent and software
capabilities driving big gains in productivity, availability and
longevity. For more information, visit the company’s website at www.ge.com/digital.

About Predix

Predix is the platform for the Industrial Internet, connecting machines,
data and people to power the digital industrial companies of the
future. Predix enables companies to connect machines, data and people
under a single, cloud-based platform supported by an unmatched ecosystem
of technologies and partners. The platform was purpose-built to meet the
scale, complexity, speed and security requirements of industrial
companies and assets.

*Predix is a trademark of General Electric Company

Contacts

GE
Ashley Nelson, +1 925-316-9197
[email protected]
or
David
McCulloch, +1 925-487-2866
[email protected]