GE and Gama Energy to operate first Digital Power Plant in Turkey

GE and Gama Energy signed an agreement to operate the first digital power plant in Turkey. This deal marks the first use of industrial cloud software applications in a power plant in Turkey to improve efficiency and productivity. GE will install GAMA’s 840 megawatt İç Anadolu Natural Gas Combined Cycle Power Plant in the city of Kırıkkale with its advanced digital solutions, Asset Performance Management (APM) and Operations Optimization (OO) solutions using Predix, the operating system for the Industrial Internet. Installation of these digital solutions is planned for Q1 2017.

Sıtkı Şerifeken, Gama Energy General Manager said “We’re proud to be the first digital power plant adopter in Turkey through our collaboration with GE. GE’s enhanced total plant capabilities, advanced digital competencies and our 15 year history together give us great confidence in these new solutions to help us reduce maintenance costs and increase operational efficiency in the plant furthermore.”

Today’s announcement builds upon last year’s multi-year agreement between GE and Gama to provide planned and unplanned maintenance services under availability and performance guarantees for two GE 9F.05 gas turbines and a GE D11 steam turbine. These services, combined with digital solutions, provide Gama’s plant operators with greater insight to predict and diagnose asset failures with enough lead time to effectively plan maintenance schedules with more reliability, while ensuring high availability and a steady revenue flow from power plant operations. As part of the 15-year agreement, GE is deploying its Fleet360* platform of customized plant solutions to help improve performance and extend maintenance intervals.

“Unplanned outages in power plants correspond to 3-8% of a plant’s capacity” said Murat Demirel, GE’s Power Services Eastern Europe and Turkey General Manager. “GE’s APM solution will bring a significant efficiency boost through early detection of such outages at power plants currently using this solution. We estimate these solutions have the potential to save up to USD 3 million annually through early detection of outages.”

The APM and OO software applications slated for implementation at GAMA’s power plant can provide numerous operational benefits such as improved reliability and availability via enhanced predictivity, accurate performance monitoring and forecasting capability, dispatch optimization via better visibility into plant capability, and lower production costs and asset generation forecasting capability for improved asset dispatch.

Natural gas has the leading position in power generation with its share of 33% in Turkey. Murat Demirel noted these digital solutions can help yield more plant operational efficiencies associated with limited natural gas resources.

$1.3 trillion value from digital transformation of the Electricity Industry
The global power generation industry is preparing for a more efficient future with digital transformation. The World Economic Forum in 2016 estimated the digital transformation of electricity represents a $1.3 trillion opportunity by 2025. Equipping power plants with service platforms and utilizing cloud computing and Industrial Internet facilities offers significant advantages in terms of efficient power generation and uninterrupted delivery to customers.

GE’s Industrial Internet platform Predix™ supports digital transformation with its solutions in energy as with many others. Predix™ has already established an ecosystem for digitalization with more than 19,000 developers onboard. This ecosystem is expanding continuously with customers’ demands and GE’s collaborations.

GAMA Energy’s İç Anadolu Natural Gas Combined Cycle Power Plant, based in Kırıkkale with a capacity of 840 MW, can alone provide 2.5% of power consumed in Turkey and more than 50% of power consumed in the capital Ankara.

GE has worked with GAMA Holding over the past 15 years on a variety of projects from combined cycle to thermal to renewable power plants focusing both on contracting and investment schemes.

Image: GAMA Energy’s Kirikkale plant (Photo: GE)