Companies such as GE are launching digital power plant systems in gas and coal plants to make operations cleaner and more efficient by using Internet of Things (IoT) technologies.
Ideologically, many people working within the tech sector are looking for the energy industry to pivot for good, move away from fossil fuels, and instead focus on greener, renewable alternatives. The realists will also admit the need in the short term to simply make the process as clean and efficient as possible, especially in developing countries where such projects are only just getting underway.
GE and the IoT
In the last year, digital industry solutions specialist GE has launched digital power plant systems for gas and coal plants. In new plants, GE’s technologies have increased the average conversion efficiency from 33 to 49%.
For the longer-standing coal plants, efficiency improvements are substantially less, although emissions of greenhouse gases can be reduced by 3%. These efficiency gains come about through a clever blend of Internet of Things (IoT) technology and active monitoring. Optimizing fuel combustion, tuning the plant to adjust to the properties of the coal being burned, adjusting the oxygen levels in the boiler, and reducing downtime due to equipment failures all have an impact.
“Access to precise, real-time information on the amount of gas flared at different sites can be compared to more effectively manage the flaring process—site to site, country to country, or process to process—enabling continuous improvement based on best practice from top performing (low emission) sites,”
“Information can be presented on a dashboard for real-time analysis, enabling a business to reduce workforce costs, increase employee safety, reduce carbon tax obligations and provide significant environmental benefits by reducing emissions and fossil fuel waste,”
Connected power plants can help to integrate renewables in the long term. This is made possible because smarter plants are more flexible and better able to respond to fluctuations in the power supplied by intermittent sources like wind and solar. In short, more connectivity means more efficiency
Semiconductor engineering teams have been collaborating with key players in the data center ecosystem in recent years, resulting in unforeseen and substantial changes in how data centers are architected and built. That includes everything from which boxes, boards, cards and cables go where, to how much it costs to run them.
The result is that bedrock communication technology and standards like serializer/deserializer (SerDes) and Ethernet are getting renewed attention. Technology that has been taken for granted is being improved, refined, and updated on a grand scale.
Some of this is being spurred by the demands and deep pockets of Facebook and Google and peers, with their billions of server hits per hour.
“There has been a relentless progression with performance and power scaling to the point where computation almost looks like an infinite resource these days,” said Steven Woo, distinguished inventor and vice president of enterprise solutions technology at Rambus. “And there is a lot more data. You need to drive decisions on what you put, where, based on that data.”
In the context of today’s cutting-edge IEEE 802.3by standard, which is uses 24-Gbps lanes to achieve 100 Gigabit throughput speeds, this is one place where chipmakers get involved.
“A lot of these are concepts and waves of thinking in data flow architectures of the 1980s, and they’re making their way back,” said Woo. “But they’re very different now. Technologies have improved relative to each other and the ratios against each other are all different. Basically, what you’re doing is taking the data flow perspective and optimizing everything.”
Minor considerations, big impact
Optimizing everything is how Marvell Semiconductor sees it, as well. Marvell continues to churn out at Ethernet switch and PHY silicon, but performance demands are rising—and the payoff for meeting those demands is greater. The cabling between the top-of-rack Ethernet switches and the array of servers beneath them may seem like a minor consideration, but it has big impact for the data center design, cost and operation. The best SerDes enable 25Gbps throughput, but they also have long-reach capability that allows for ‘direct attach’ without supplemental power.
This potential brought together a worldwide “meeting of the minds” among power users like Google, the rest of the industry, and IEEE to have a 25Gbps standard, and not go directly from 10Gbps to 40Gbps. Not only is power supply removed within the rack, but equally as important, the backplane can be copper, not fiber.
Engineering teams are working overtime to develop 802.3by-capable silicon and systems in light of all of this.
“We also just introduced something called ‘link training’ where you are decoding a communications link between Ethernet transceivers and replicating that link between 10Gbps and 25Gbps.”
Marvell uses ARM cores in many of its switch families, which helps keep the silicon power consumption low. ARM has spent decades perfecting that.
“The CPU must use DDR,” said Amit Avivi, senior product line manager at Marvell. “But the switch level bandwidth is way too high to use DDR. Advanced switch (silicon) within the switch (device), optimize the traffic to minimize the memory needs. There is lots of prioritization, and there are lots of handshakes to optimize that traffic.”
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3 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
IoT technologies used to make power plants more efficient
http://www.controleng.com/single-article/iot-technologies-used-to-make-power-plants-more-efficient/c9373673ada619daec5f9e110a495e53.html?OCVALIDATE&ocid=101781
Companies such as GE are launching digital power plant systems in gas and coal plants to make operations cleaner and more efficient by using Internet of Things (IoT) technologies.
Ideologically, many people working within the tech sector are looking for the energy industry to pivot for good, move away from fossil fuels, and instead focus on greener, renewable alternatives. The realists will also admit the need in the short term to simply make the process as clean and efficient as possible, especially in developing countries where such projects are only just getting underway.
GE and the IoT
In the last year, digital industry solutions specialist GE has launched digital power plant systems for gas and coal plants. In new plants, GE’s technologies have increased the average conversion efficiency from 33 to 49%.
For the longer-standing coal plants, efficiency improvements are substantially less, although emissions of greenhouse gases can be reduced by 3%. These efficiency gains come about through a clever blend of Internet of Things (IoT) technology and active monitoring. Optimizing fuel combustion, tuning the plant to adjust to the properties of the coal being burned, adjusting the oxygen levels in the boiler, and reducing downtime due to equipment failures all have an impact.
“Access to precise, real-time information on the amount of gas flared at different sites can be compared to more effectively manage the flaring process—site to site, country to country, or process to process—enabling continuous improvement based on best practice from top performing (low emission) sites,”
“Information can be presented on a dashboard for real-time analysis, enabling a business to reduce workforce costs, increase employee safety, reduce carbon tax obligations and provide significant environmental benefits by reducing emissions and fossil fuel waste,”
Connected power plants can help to integrate renewables in the long term. This is made possible because smarter plants are more flexible and better able to respond to fluctuations in the power supplied by intermittent sources like wind and solar. In short, more connectivity means more efficiency
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Clean is Your Cloud and Telecom?
http://www.epanorama.net/newepa/2012/04/18/how-clean-is-your-cloud-and-telecom/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Chip Advances Play Big Role In Cloud
Semiconductor improvements add up to big savings in power and performance.
http://semiengineering.com/chip-advances-play-larger-role-in-data-center/
Semiconductor engineering teams have been collaborating with key players in the data center ecosystem in recent years, resulting in unforeseen and substantial changes in how data centers are architected and built. That includes everything from which boxes, boards, cards and cables go where, to how much it costs to run them.
The result is that bedrock communication technology and standards like serializer/deserializer (SerDes) and Ethernet are getting renewed attention. Technology that has been taken for granted is being improved, refined, and updated on a grand scale.
Some of this is being spurred by the demands and deep pockets of Facebook and Google and peers, with their billions of server hits per hour.
“There has been a relentless progression with performance and power scaling to the point where computation almost looks like an infinite resource these days,” said Steven Woo, distinguished inventor and vice president of enterprise solutions technology at Rambus. “And there is a lot more data. You need to drive decisions on what you put, where, based on that data.”
In the context of today’s cutting-edge IEEE 802.3by standard, which is uses 24-Gbps lanes to achieve 100 Gigabit throughput speeds, this is one place where chipmakers get involved.
“A lot of these are concepts and waves of thinking in data flow architectures of the 1980s, and they’re making their way back,” said Woo. “But they’re very different now. Technologies have improved relative to each other and the ratios against each other are all different. Basically, what you’re doing is taking the data flow perspective and optimizing everything.”
Minor considerations, big impact
Optimizing everything is how Marvell Semiconductor sees it, as well. Marvell continues to churn out at Ethernet switch and PHY silicon, but performance demands are rising—and the payoff for meeting those demands is greater. The cabling between the top-of-rack Ethernet switches and the array of servers beneath them may seem like a minor consideration, but it has big impact for the data center design, cost and operation. The best SerDes enable 25Gbps throughput, but they also have long-reach capability that allows for ‘direct attach’ without supplemental power.
This potential brought together a worldwide “meeting of the minds” among power users like Google, the rest of the industry, and IEEE to have a 25Gbps standard, and not go directly from 10Gbps to 40Gbps. Not only is power supply removed within the rack, but equally as important, the backplane can be copper, not fiber.
Engineering teams are working overtime to develop 802.3by-capable silicon and systems in light of all of this.
“We also just introduced something called ‘link training’ where you are decoding a communications link between Ethernet transceivers and replicating that link between 10Gbps and 25Gbps.”
Marvell uses ARM cores in many of its switch families, which helps keep the silicon power consumption low. ARM has spent decades perfecting that.
“The CPU must use DDR,” said Amit Avivi, senior product line manager at Marvell. “But the switch level bandwidth is way too high to use DDR. Advanced switch (silicon) within the switch (device), optimize the traffic to minimize the memory needs. There is lots of prioritization, and there are lots of handshakes to optimize that traffic.”