Owensboro Municipal Utilities (OMU) is a municipally owned and operated electric utility based in Owensboro, Kentucky. OMU's Elmer Smith Station is a coal-burning facility consisting of two units (one cyclone and one T-fired) with a combined capacity of 425 MW. It is under continuous pressure to reliably and cost-effectively deliver electricity to its ratepayer owners. OMU believes that to improve the plant's profitability, it needs to improve its ability to understand the financial impacts of its operational and maintenance actions. The plant had invested in instrumentation, control and data systems (e.g. Metso DCS, Black and Veatch's Online Performance Monitoring (OPM) system, OSIsoft PI data historian, and Invensys AvantisPro CMMS), but it was having difficulty extracting the knowledge necessary to make financially-motivated decisions. To that end, OMU invested in NeuCo, Inc.'s integrated performance, maintenance and profit optimization systems, to enable the plant to perform comprehensive, real-time cost and revenue analyses and determine opportunities for improving profitability. The system brings together process, fuels, and maintenance data so plant personnel can better understand the impacts of their actions and decisions, and prioritize their work activities (including project evaluation and scheduling) based on profitability impacts (combining efficiency, capacity and reliability.) It leverages first principles models, heuristics rules and neural network optimization to achieve optimized actions and, ultimately, maximum profitability. This paper will discuss the implementation and methodology of a real-time profit and maintenance management system at OMU's Elmer Smith Station and how it's helping OMU to become more efficient and profitable.
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