Williams Power, a unit of the Williams Companies, is installing a new generation management system (GMS) for its electrical generation assets, which include two company-owned power plants and six contracted facilities seven states. The GMS will integrate data from different automation systems and applications to help Williams precisely schedule the delivery of generation capacity from each plant to meet demand.

The system monitors demand trend data by communicating with three contracted ISO (Independent System Transmission Operator) organizations that serve California, the Midwest, and Mid-Atlantic region. The ISOs monitor and direct the flow of wholesale electric power into and throughout the distribution grids that serve their regional markets.

The Williams system will connect the regional ISOs through a LiveData Inc. server using ICCP (Inter-Control Center Protocol), which enables real-time two-directional flow of remote data across multiple protocols.

A centralized business decision environment containing all plant and market demand data will allow Williams to provide hourly set point dispatch control for production from the generating plants. Williams says real time scheduling will help prevent deficits in capacity, as well as the generation of too much electricity, which minimizes economic risk and optimizes the production value of each generation asset. 

The GMS will be engineered using new modular power industry applications created in the Invensys InFusion Engineering Environment, which allows deployment on different automation systems. 

InFusion Access and Historian will collect and model data from a variety of device types at the eight power plants, comparing the production data in real time with customer demand trend data from the ISOs. The InFusion View graphical user interface and Invensys SuiteVoyager for InFusion Web portal will provide a local human machine interface (HMI) for operator visualization and provide authorized managers with secure remote access to GMS information. 

The GMS replaces an existing SCADA system. Williams Power says the upgrade will provide a more flexible, easier-to-deploy, standards-based system. The business-decision support platform is expected to be able to adapt to changes in asset configuration and energy market characteristics.

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