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Energy Management Systems

Real-time telemetry from generating plants in China and Australia back to a monitoring center in Florida.

Also known as EMS, Plant Telemetry

Left to right is time. Each row is one of the 3 disciplines this one worked alongside, ordered so kindred disciplines sit next to each other rather than alphabetically — a landscape only means anything if neighboring rows belong together. Height is the work running in that domain in that year, weighted by what failure would have cost — life-safety ×3, a statutory obligation ×2.2, the estate itself ×1.5, an evaluation ×1. Every project declares which of those it was, so each ridge traces to an entry you can open and disagree with. Only the work that used this technology is counted, so what shows here is the company it kept rather than the record around it. Height and color are on the record-wide scale rather than this page’s own, so a modest estate draws a modest landscape and any two of these pages can be read against each other.

Architected the wide-area network carrying real-time plant data from GE power generation facilities overseas — sites in China and Perth, Australia — back to GE’s energy management monitoring center in Melbourne, Florida.

Bonded multilink serial transport with EIGRP delay tuning to control path preference across links of unequal capacity, HSRP router pairs at every site with cross-over links, and a Checkpoint firewall separating the energy management zone from everything outside it. The EMS estate itself ran on Sun and Windows hosts.

Real-time telemetry off a generating plant is not a reporting feed. If the monitoring center cannot see the machine, nobody is watching a turbine on the other side of the world, and the design had to assume a circuit would fail rather than hope it would not.

Applied in

  • GE International Power Generation Monitoring Network2002–2004Real-time plant telemetry from generating facilities in China and Australia back to a monitoring center in Florida.
  • JEA Power Quality Metering Network2001–2004Voltage sags, swells and harmonics measured at ten substations — one template design, an addressing plan built for it, and fiber off the ground grid, before the data was aggregated into the PIE SCADA platform.

Career

See also

Also searched as

  • IoT
  • Internet of Things
  • Industrial IoT
  • IIoT
  • M2M
  • machine to machine

Instrumented plant, metering, roadside and building devices reporting over a network — the practice the term was coined for, two decades before it had the name.