AGL

Rapid Growth Presents Challenges

While AGL had been an established energy provider to Australia since 1837, a series of power generation acquisitions, facility constructions and other investments fuelled rapid growth of the company’s generation portfolio from 300 to 10,000 Mega Watts over nine years.

The impressive growth changed the company’s generation asset division quickly and according to David Bartolo, the company’s Head of Operational Systems and Technology, had put the company in ‘data dire straits’.

“We were completely disconnected,” says Bartolo. “We weren’t able to share data across sites and we certainly weren’t able to get data to our head office. We had black spots along with disparate and manual systems that were causing headaches.”

The journey to a centralized system:

Realizing the operational efficiencies that could be achieved from a centralized data system and common performance measures, AGL sought out a business tool for downtime, uptime and asset management.

“We saw the need for an automated system” says Mark Faith, AGL’s Engineer, Reliability and Performance Systems. “We knew there had to be a smarter way to do it.”

RtTech’s RtDUET solution was an easy choice for AGL as it integrated seamlessly with their new data historian, OSIsoft’s PI System. Furthermore, RtDUET was configurable with AGL’s time usage classifications and KPI calculations to comply with the NERCS and IEEE international standards for power generation.

“I compare RtDUET to an app on your phone. The right apps make the phone so much more useful,” says David Bartolo, speaking of the value RtDUET adds to their data historian.

Achieving automated data accuracy with RtDUET:

Now successfully deployed in two of the company’s business units, AGL reports an initial increase of 5% data accuracy after a few months. They’re also in the process of decommissioning the costly reporting systems that RtDUET has replaced.

“We have ensured data precision in terms of asset performance and can now chase improvements because we know they are real” says David Bartolo.

Further integrations have allowed AGL to stream the RtDUET data directly into their process logbooks, which means even less human interaction within the process. In addition to automated data collection and classification processes, RtDUET provides AGL with an IIoT-connected solution that offers:

• Standardized reporting system and automatic KPI calculations
• Alignment with international standards for power generation (NERCS and IEEE)
• A single data repository and supported system across all sites

AGL is one of Australia’s leading integrated renewable energy companies and is taking action to gradually reduce its greenhouse gas emissions while providing secure and affordable energy to its customers. Drawing on over 175 years of experience, AGL serves its customers throughout eastern Australia with their energy requirements, including gas, electricity, solar PV and related products and services. AGL has a diverse power generation portfolio including base, peaking and intermediate generation plants, spread across traditional thermal generation as well as renewable sources including hydro, wind, solar, landfill gas and biomass.

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