Norwegian Power Company BKK is to adopt GE Renewable Energy’s Hydro digital solutions for 30 hydropower plants.
BKK is to use GE’s Asset Performance Management (APM) over an initial 5-year license agreement to facilitate the digital transformation of its O&M practices across its hydropower fleet, which has a total capacity over 1.6GW.
In today’s challenging energy market, a hydropower operator such as BKK faces multiple challenges, including increasing pressure on power prices and new operating patterns with the rise of intermittent renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. Additionally, tighter regulations, aging assets, and workforce turnover create more complex operating cost environments.
To address these challenges, BKK has launched an ambitious program to reduce the costs of both corrective and preventive maintenance across its plants, to increase the lifetime of individual components, and to avoid production losses due to forced and planned outages. Complementarily, BKK is also looking at increasing the flexibility and the agility of its organization to be able to adapt faster to a changing environment and to react efficiently to crises.
“Through this collaboration with GE Renewable Norway AS, BKK will have a better system for controlling the risk of failure against the costs of repairs and the value of ensuring the availability of each power plant,” said Olav Osvoll, Executive Vice President Production at BKK. “We will view our entire business in context at a glance and control the lifespan of all the assets we have under management.”
GE Renewable Energy’s Hydro Digital team began connecting and streaming data from the BKK central data repository to GE’s cloud-based APM solutions in June 2020. The APM Strategy and Health modules will be used to: develop an assessment of failure risks; define the right mitigation actions for each risk; evaluate the overall health of hydro assets based on all available data; and enable a continuous improvement loop.
“Our journey with BKK began over the past year during which we drew up together the digital roadmap and the solution mix that will help BKK address its most pressing challenges,” commented Pascal Radue, President and CEO of GE's Hydro Solutions. “I am thrilled by the vision of Olav Osvoll, Executive Vice President Production at BKKand by the commitment of the BKK team to reinvent themselves at all levels of their organization. I am looking forward to seeing our two companies execute this cutting-edge digitalization project.”
