GE applies plant software to green data center

A big company like GE has plenty of technology to apply to problems
like running greener data centers. That’s why I wasn’t exactly
surprised to see a GE
announcement that they are applying their own technology to
improve energy use at one of their big data centers in Ohio.

But in digging deeper into the annoucement, I was pleasantly
suprised to learn that a big part of the technology they are
leveraging includes some of the plant software capabilities from
their GE Intelligent Platforms
unit. The data center project is expected to yield just over a 11
percent improvement in energy consumption, while cutting water use
by 20 percent.

In a phone interview with Mark Moyer, an account director with GE
Intelligent Platforms, I learned that the dashboard and performance
management capabilities for the project come from the deployment of
Proficy Process Systems (PPS), an new generation of distributed
control system that makes use of GE Intelligent Platforms’s Proficy
software for supervisory control and plant performance management.
Moyer says the system will overlay some existing disparate
control-level sources of data on energy, power, and water use and
manage them centrally. “We are able to bring those sources of data
together and see how different factors push and pull on each
other,” he says.

The vendor’s Proficy software is essentially “agnostic” as to the
problems it can be applied to, says Moyer. While traditionally,
Proficy apps are used to monitor and fine tune production
processes, they also can be applied to optimizing energy and water
use for running a big data center or an office building.

I’ve seen other plant-focused software vendors address energy
issues before, though nothing quite so focused on data center
optimization. Several years ago now, OSIsoft began to talk up the potential
of blending its portal and plant historian capabilities with
current energy consumption and price data to arrive at real-time
optimization of energy use on the plant floor. For SAP users in the
oil & gas industry, SAP has developed an xApp for Emissions
Management. The use of supervisory control software by utilities
operators and building managers is a long established market. It
all goes to show that software capabilities such as visualization,
historization of process data, and plant performance management
have some fairly broad uses, and increasingly, some of them will
zero in on green goals.