ABB Automation & Power World 2012

Pre-event webinar series for APWorld

2011-02-23T13:10:00.001-06:00

Get a sneak peak at what Automation & Power World is all about by attending a pre-event webinar:

The keys to safe design, retrofit and manufacturing of power transformers
Thursday, February 24 - 2:00 pm EST

Three keys to properly sizing a motor and drive combination
Tuesday, March 1 - 2:00 pm EST

Improving safety through arc resistant switchgear and arc reducing components
Wednesday, March 2 - 2:00 pm EST

Substation design fundamentals: How substations are designed and deployed in the marketplace
Tuesday, March 8 - 2:00 pm EST

Register now

Farewell to Houston, welcome to Orlando

2010-05-20T19:24:00.004-05:00

So it's farewell to Automation and Power World 2010. This year's event attracted more than 4,000 participants, and it's hard to appreciate quite what that means in terms of scale until you've walked the half-mile between a meeting at one end of the building and the exhibition at the other.

At lunch on the final day, Enrique Santacana, head of ABB in the US and North America, said visitor numbers were up by more than 30 percent compared with last year's event, which was ABB's first to combine both the power and automation sides of the company's activities.

Next year, Automation and Power World moves to Orlando, Florida, and takes place April 19-21.

Podcast: how a “green” distribution transformer works

2010-05-20T11:34:00.012-05:00

ABB has a line of high-efficiency transformers for the distribution of power to consumers. The highest-efficiency product in the family is designed with amorphous metal, which is an alloy in which the atoms have a random pattern.

Listen to Mario Lemarroy (pictured left), international marketing manager for Distribution Transformers, explain the benefits of an amorphous metal transformer.

How and when will the deployment of electric vehicles impact the grid?

2010-05-20T09:07:00.004-05:00

The panel for this discussion comprised:
Bazmi Husain, head of smart grids at ABB
Valerie Feldmann, associate partner at McKinsey & Co.
Mike McCabe, manager of electric vehicle services at Reliant Energy

Feldmann: electric vehicle adoption in mega cities
McKinsey has partnered with city governments in New York, Paris and Shanghai to explore the implications of electric vehicle adoption in the period 2015-2025. The research found that by 2015, somewhere between 5-15 percent of new vehicles sold will likely be electric vehicles.

The early adopters will be driven by a favorable attitude toward electric vehicles and questions of sustainability, rather than any vehicle performance criteria. In addition, early adopters don’t necessarily need a dense public infrastructure of charging stations.

What can city governments do to foster adoption of electric vehicles in their cities? The most effective measures at lowest cost included allowing electric vehicles into faster lanes and providing favorable parking spots. An increase in financial incentives, however, is unlikely to significantly increase adoption of electric vehicles, it found.

In Paris, more focus was placed on exploring at what point in time there would be a significant impact on the grid from electric vehicles. The research found that only when there is an adoption rate of more than 20 percent of new vehicles sold will there be a noticeable impact on the grid.

McCabe: the power of the plug-in
Reliant Energy launched its “Power of the Plug-In” project in November 2009 with 10 city-owned Toyota Prius cars converted to plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. In addition, 10 vehicle charging stations were installed, seven of them available to the public as well.

The main objectives of the program are to increase awareness of plug-in electric cars and to promote Houston as an electric vehicle center.

Husain: perspective of infrastructure provider
The need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and efforts by governments to reduce dependence on oil imports are driving the adoption of electric vehicles.

The charging infrastructure is of course important but there are other things as well: on-board equipment has to be mass produced; battery technology and production must be ramped up quickly; and the electricity grid must be prepared for the e-mobility impact.

Infrastructure will likely be installed over a period of decades, starting in cities, then moving to trunk roads before becoming ubiquitous. Slow and ultrafast DC charging are set to dominate the charging methods.

Using cars as a storage method for electricity is a more complex issue with many open questions: for example, frequent unloading and recharging of a battery reduces its lifetime and incurs replacement costs. This impacts warranties.

Integrating storage capacity into the charging infrastructure, rather than on board the vehicle, is another possibility that can also help to reduce the impact of charging on the grid.

Q&A
Q: What technology solutions can help to tackle the infrastructure challenges as penetration of electric vehicles increases?
Feldmann said McKinsey’s research found that 2025 is the year when we start to see a real impact on the grid of electric vehicles, so it is not yet a pressing issue.

Husain said such questions might arise earlier as early adopters of electric vehicles may well be clustered in certain residential areas.

McCabe added that most vehicle charging was likely to take place in the home. In addition, if there is a network of fast DC chargers this would act as a safety net for drivers of electric vehicles so they would know they are never more than a few miles from a charging stations. Although most vehicles are likely to be plugged in at the same time, they won’t all start charging at the same time, and utilities will likely have rate models to encourage charging at off-peak times.

Q: A large fleet of electric vehicles will result in power grid operating closer to full capacity more of the time: What impact will this have on equipment in the grid?

McCabe said this scenario is still a long way off.

Smart grid developments that industry should be watching

2010-05-19T15:34:00.002-05:00

ARC Advisory Group, the research and consultancy company, expects growth for smart grid applications to rise steadily over the next few years, although the pace of growth is likely to vary from region to region.

Whereas the withdrawal of stimulus funds and lackluster economic performance has relieved pressure on utilities in mature markets to make smart grid investments, emerging regions such as Asia are likely to experience a return to the peak loads of pre-recession years much faster, according to Harry Forbes, a senior analyst at ARC.

A smart grid should allow more active participation by consumers, accommodate all types of power generation, improve reliability and be secure from cyber attacks. Given the increased financial constraints, applications that improve energy efficiency and reliability of the grid will probably be most important for the North American market, Forbes said.

Forbes identified three areas of the development of smart grids that industry should be watching particularly closely.

The first is the development of electric markets. Currently, only consumers of power with sizeable generation facilities of their own can participate actively in power markets, but the widespread deployment of smart meters is likely to bring smaller producer/consumers in as well.

How they will participate remains an open question, Forbes added. He said intermediaries may become one route to the electric market for small and mid-sized businesses with fairly simple power requirements, similar to the model in financial markets where many smaller players participate mainly through intermediaries such as fund managers.

The second area to watch, Forbes said, is how demand can be steered to match supply more closely. Forbes sought to dispel the notion that smart meters will be used to provide consumers with real-time pricing to manage demand, saying that this is likely to result in too much volatility for consumers to be acceptable to policy makers.

“So what are smart meters good for? Smart meters are primarily an enabler of time-of-use tariffs,” he explained. “It gives public policy more flexibility to match cost and price, but it’s going to be a simple rate structure similar to the one that applies to cell phone rates, with higher and lower cost periods.”

The third area to watch is storage, Forbes added. “It’s a kind of holy grail. If we had unconstrained amounts of energy storage, our grid operations would be much easier,” he said.

How will the Smart Grid Impact Industry?

2010-05-19T15:04:00.003-05:00

This presentation went fast and furious, so I was able to write down a few highlights from "How will the Smart Grid Impact Industry?"

What characterizes a smart grid?

Enable active participation by customers
Accommodate all generation and storage options
Enable new products, services and marketing
Provide power quality for the digital economy
Optimize asset utilization and operating efficiency
Anticipate and respond to system disturbances
Operate resiliently against attack or natural disasters

Smart Grid Applications

Advanced Metering

Remote Connect/Disconnect

Distribution Automation

Volt-VAR Optimization

FDIR

Renewable Generation

Wide Area Monitoring

Generation Aggregation

Energy Analytics

Energy Storage

Dist Gen

Demand Response

PHEV/EV Integration

Smart Home Appliances

New Applications

Enabling Services

Network Communication Services

Utility Internal Communication – Metering, generation management, grid/transmission management, distribution management
End User Customer Communications – end user-to-utility, device-level communications, local/remote communications

Impacted Utility Business Processes

System Operations – operation, management, and distribution operation management
Business Operations – Customer Service, billing, outage management, field workforce management, load forecasting, generation and transmission planning, rate design

How smart is today’s grid?

Today’s grid already has many attributes of tomorrow’s smart grid, but only within parts of the utility, and not extended to most utility customers.

Does today’s grid enable active participation by customers?

Yes, for major industrials, IPPs, no for commercial or residential customers.

Does today’s grid accommodate generation and storage options?

Yes, for utility scale only.

Dimensions of smart grid analysis

Applications – Many
Customer Segments – Industrial, Commercial, Residential
Regulations – local, state, national, commercial, technical
Enabling Services – Communication, Security, Mobility, Standards
Organizations – Utilities (IOUs, Municipals, Agencies, Coops, State Enterprises), Regulators (National (many), state, local), Suppliers – Equipment, systems, services, financial services
Time Horizon

What will drive Smart Grid Growth?

ARC’s market growth forecast for smart metering and smart grid: in 2010, 2.5 billion USD, doubling by 2013 to 5 billion USD. However, every forecast requires a regional context; NA, EU, and BRIC countries will have very different utility business conditions

Best Smart Grid Applications for North American business climate? Applications that improve both efficiency and reliability:

Demand Response

Distribution Automation

Energy Storage

Smart Meters are not going to enable real-time pricing, but rather time-of-use tariff. Real-time pricing is far too unstable on a daily basis for customers to endure.

Demand Response

A level playing field for Demand Response means C&I DR cost/benefit would be comparable to residential, and rate structures would be neutral with respect to new peaking capacity vs Demand Response.

Chat with ABB Executives

2010-05-19T14:44:00.003-05:00

Highlights from the Chat with ABB Executives at Automation & Power World 2010.

Panel:
Rick Hepperla: Head of Discrete Automation and Motion, ABB North America
Enrique Santacana: CEO, ABB North America
Peter Terwiesch: CTO, ABB Group
Veli-Matti Reinikkala: Head of Process Automation, ABB Group
Ulrich Spiesshofer: Discrete Auotmation, ABB Group
Anders Sjoelin: Head of Power Systems, ABB North America

Q: Please share one initiative that provided most value to customers.

Rick: Discrete Automation and Motion repositioned products around energy savings and energy efficiency, and allowed for retrofit opportunities.

Enrique: From a region perspective, we redoubled commitment to smart grid. Added significant amount of resources as well.

Peter: In harder times, ABB intensified efforts in R&D for future success. It did not seem obvious at the time, but we will be able to come out better from the latest international financial crisis.

Veli-Matti: Process Automation focused on external issues to better serve customers.

Ulrich: We are now much more aligned with market dynamics and market segments.

Anders: Power Systems has continued to build up competencies in core technologies to better serve North American Market.

Q: Based on economy, how does ABB measure success in each of your groups? What are you doing to measure that success?

Ulrich; We use an enhanced performance measurement system with a strong external focus, including Net Promoter Score, which is a management tool that can be used to gauge the loyalty of a firm's customer relationships.

Enrique: Project execution, making sure that as we have had to align supply to demand, that we do not lose focus on the level of quality we are expected to deliver. We have experienced a 20% drop in demand, and have never seen such a big drop in a short period of time.

Q: ABB is a strong company with a lot of breadth. What metrics have you implemented to break the silos?

Veli-Matti: A CEO who arrived from outside sees a company differently than one who has been with the same company for many years. We have identified the problem, which is silo structure, and taken steps to lower silo walls. The entire company management will be measured against company success, not division success. ABB also started quite a bit of effort between divisions to put the next level of management to work with each other to find solutions to represent ourselves in front of customers as one company. It has brought results.

Enrique: In recent years, we have organized our company to increase regional focus. 15-20 years ago, we had country-specific targets and goals, in addition to division silos. Now we have eight regions around the world.

Rick: One thing that comes up with customers; they say don’t like the silos, but they love how focused ABB is on our technologies, so there has to be a balance. We have made a major transition to move from 19 ERP systems in US alone to one ERP. So behind the curtains we’ve moved away some of the barriers.

Podcast: how a new wireless sensor makes the grid smarter

2010-05-19T11:51:00.010-05:00

At the Automation and Power World exhibition, ABB is presenting a new wireless sensor for power distribution networks that helps utilities save money by optimizing power line voltages.

Listen to Jon Rennie, who's responsible for ABB's Medium Voltage Instrument Transformer business in North America, talk about how the GridSync sensor works and what benefits it can deliver.

Status of Solar Power Generation in North America

2010-05-19T10:29:00.002-05:00

Gonzalo Stabile, Director of Research and Development from enXco, an independent power producer (IPP) based out of San Diego, gave the presentation.

Solar Development

178 megawatts (MW) were added in US 2009; 46 MW were added in Canada. North America is still five years behind European markets; technology transfer has been slower than anticipated.

There has also been a large drop in pricing on silicon from 450 to 75 USD/kg, which is likely to shift focus away from thin film in 2011-12 if silicon pricing remains stable.

Primary barriers are grid connection for the European Union (EU), while for the US standardization remains a challenge

Concentrating Solar Power (CSP)

850 MW Worldwide Installed Capacity
2008-09 showed consolidation and new installations, mainly in Spain.
Consolidations may slow CSP development in the near future. Siemens’ acquisition of Israeli solar power company Solel was cited as an example.
Resurgence of power tower designs
Expected growth of 40-50% per year

Solar Project Financing - Photovoltaic

2009 saw some of the first traditionally financed projects in the US. The financing process can sometimes take longer than the development and construction cycle!

Standard operating procedures for financing: Performance guarantees, warranty reviews, and vendor due diligence. This differs from other previous funding mechanisms. No standard currently exists for financing. As more projects are financed the requirements change and invariably increase, which strains owners and operators with various definitions for Performance Ratio, Availability, Warranty Term, Outages, etc.

Solar Performance Guarantees

Currently, there is a lack of true EPCs for Solar PV facilities.Owners/financiers liable for performance shortfalls under current financing schemes. Contractors likely to take on the guarantees in the future.

There have been shortfalls of IEC 61724 and other current working groups on defining methodologies, formulas, and sensor maintenance requirements.

Various methodologies exist for the calculation of performance, usually Plant Performance Ratio (PPR) and Performance Ratio (PR).

Guarantees are increasing from one year to two years.

Pricing Trends

Pricing will continue to decline, especially in PV Modules, Labor, and Racking.

Challenges:

Regulatory Immaturity
Siting issues
Uncertainty with Thin Film Future
Lack of operational procedures and preventative maintenance procedures in Field PV products

Capturing the energy efficiency opportunities in industry starts with commitment at the top

2010-05-19T10:22:00.005-05:00

Energy efficiency measures can save money and emissions. That was one of the main points made by ABB CEO Joe Hogan in his keynote address on May 18.

How to develop energy efficiency strategies that impact the bottom line was the focus of a workshop led by Dick Hill, general manager of ARC Advisory Group’s Manufacturing Advisory Services.

He noted that industry is the No. 1 consumer of energy in the US, accounting for about one-third of national energy consumption. Hill said industry’s consumption has been trending downwards in recent years whereas other big areas of consumption – transportation, residential and commercial – are still rising.

“Industry has been saving energy over time, but it’s going to become even more important,” Hill said. “Nobody really knows where the cost of energy will go, but all predictions show that it will continue to grow over time.”

A survey of industrial plants in the US conducted by ARC Energy Management in 2010 found that there’s still a long way to go, Hill said. The survey found that 40 percent of plants had no energy manager and nearly half had no energy-related key performance indicators (KPIs) for operators.

Hill concluded with 10 recommendations for improving energy management:
• Secure management’s full support
• Plant-level energy teams (and include automation people)
• Build an energy strategic plan (to get started you have to benchmark where you are and develop a vision of where you want to end up)
• Perform an energy audit – identify the current reality
• Establish energy metrics
• Benchmark with other plants inside or outside your organization
• Energy KPIs, not just for management
• Online energy measurements
• Automate to optimize
• Empower the workforce by giving them the KPIs they need to identify the impact of their actions

The benefits of following the energy and policy trends

2010-05-18T17:12:00.003-05:00

Continuing a theme that has emerged as a leitmotiv in many sessions at this event, Anders Nordstrom, ABB Group sustainability adviser, focused on the challenges of rising energy consumption in a Business Forum workshop.

If we continue with business as usual, he said, we will still be deriving 80 percent of our energy from fossil fuels in 2030. But to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, we must dramatically reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

“We use a lot of energy and that is good because it creates wealth, but at the same time it brings challenges,” he said.

Since 1960, labor productivity has increased more than threefold, material productivity has almost doubled, while energy productivity has risen by barely 50 percent, according to McKinsey research (shown left). While there is no evidence that energy productivity can rise as much as labor productivity, ABB is convinced there is considerable room for improvement, Nordstrom added.

He outlined research by the International Energy Agency showing that energy efficiency measures could cut global end use of energy by 20 percent by 2030. The three top IEA recommendations to industry are:
• Improve energy management
• Use better electric motors
• Small- and medium-sized enterprises must act

The IEA has also made a series of recommendations to national governments on policies to improve energy efficiency, and monitors the extent to which they are applied around the world. The UK and Japan have done best, implementing some 55 percent of the recommendations, while the US is at 50 percent.

Nordstrom’s main message is that governments are developing and implementing national strategies and that it probably pays for industry to get ahead of the game.

A McKinsey study looking at energy efficiency potential concluded that final energy use could be cut by 23 percent by 2020, representing $1.2 trillion in savings for an up-front investment of about $520 billion, Nordstrom explained. The biggest opportunity – 40 percent of the total savings – is in industry. This is also the area with the best payback: for every dollar of energy efficiency investment in industry, you get $4 back, he said.

Turning to renewable energy, Nordstrom showed that although fossil fuels continue to dominate Europe’s power capacity mix, a shift is afoot. Comparing data from 2006 and 2009, he explained that coal, oil and nuclear generation have declined, while gas and all forms of renewables are on the rise.

And this is a trend that is supported by policy, Nordstrom said. More than $180 billion has been assigned to clean energy investments during the 2009-2011 period under government stimulus programs.

“The energy trend is toward energy efficiency, the energy trend is toward renewables; the policy trend is toward energy efficiency, the policy trend is toward renewables,” Nordstrom concluded.

ABB's Chief Technology Officer discusses trends in power and automation

2010-05-18T09:42:00.002-05:00

Peter Terwiesch, Chief Technology Officer, met the press to discuss the trends influencing developments in power and automation technologies.

The big trend, he said, is the need to deliver more power to a growing world population with rising living standards, while lowering emissions. The scientific consensus is that emissions need to be reduced by 50 percent, and to achieve this energy efficiency needs to be increased and the energy supply needs to be decarbonized.

As the world is increasingly digitizing, the risk and potential costs of non-performance of the power system are growing and creating an ever stronger need to improve reliability at the same time, he added

Renewable energy is one route toward a lower carbon system for which ABB is developing new products, Terwiesch said. Last year, the company launched a solar inverter for large-scale photovoltaic plants, for example.

But traditional hydropower still offers opportunities in many parts of the world, and high-voltage direct current (HVDC) technology is offering the means to tap some of the more remote sources and to deliver huge amounts of power, he said. An HVDC power transmission link in China which ABB is helping to build – from a dam at Xiangjiaba to the city of Shanghai – has a capacity of 6,400 megawatts, almost as much as the entire power capacity of Switzerland.

Wind energy poses a major challenge because of its intermittency. Storage is key to helping smooth out such swings and will be a big contributor to the development of a smarter grid, which is why ABB has just launched a new product called SVC Light with Energy Storage, he said.

Terwiesch said the “moving electrons” aspect of the smart grid is underestimated. He said there is so much focus today on the increasing automation that is being added to the grid – what he called the “bits and bytes” part – that there is a risk of forgetting the need to do something with that data, which is controlling the power flows.

Also, although the smart grid will eventually look quite different from today’s grid, the new technologies and solutions being developed will be added and integrated into today’s infrastructure.

One way in which technology could enhance the existing grid is by adding more direct current (DC) links to deliver large volumes of power over long distances, Terwiesch said. This is happening already in China, and there are visions and scenarios for developing DC overlay grids to complement AC grids in Europe and the US.

Terwiesch also spoke of a trend toward integration of process and power automation. ABB has more than 20 integration projects in progress around the world today, compared to “a handful” a year ago, he said.

“I think this has developed substantial dynamics,” Terwiesch said.

Further, ABB’s chief technology officer spoke of the trend toward wireless devices for measuring data around industrial plants in process automation industries. He said that, today, there are 30 million installed hard devices and that 90 percent of them can’t exchange information about the asset on which they located. A wireless device can help to “liberate” that information, Terwiesch said.

As customers don’t like devices with batteries that have to be changed periodically, Terwiesch said he expects the future will be an autonomous device that harvests its own energy from solar energy, from flows, from excess heat and from vibration. ABB recently presented a prototype of such a device, he added.

ABB to build $90 million cable plant in US

2010-05-18T09:36:00.011-05:00

Enrique Santacana, head of ABB in the US and North America, announced at a press briefing that ABB plans to invest about $90 million to build a new high-voltage cable factory.

The investment is due to strong growth in high-voltage direct current (HVDC) applications, particularly to integrate renewable energy into the grid and to increase the efficiency of power transmission.

"It is very strong demand growth that we see," Santacana said.

A decision on the location of the plant is still pending, he added.

ABB CEO's keynote speech

2010-05-18T07:52:00.005-05:00

ABB’s three-day Automation and Power World event got underway in Houston with a keynote address by Joe Hogan, chief executive officer.

Starting with a macro-economic overview, Hogan noted that the situation was a lot less dire than when he spoke at the same event last year. Then, the world economy appeared to be teetering on the brink, whereas there are now some clear signs of a rebound, such as the US economy’s 3.3 percent growth in the first quarter.

Also, the emerging economies never slipped into recession.

“China and India and some other major economies around the world have shown that they can really steer their own boat,” he said.

Hogan showed that this is part of a major shift underway in the world economy. Emerging markets are on the rise and are set to account for a larger share of the global economy than the G7 nations by 2014.

Two maps, side by side, showed how distorted the world economy is today: if you draw countries according to the size of their GDP, North America and Europe dominate, but when drawn by population size then India and China are by far the largest. Such countries are recapturing their rightful share of the global economy and this is a trend business must learn to ride.

“China’s brought 400 million people out of poverty in the last 20 years: That’s great for all of us,” he said. “You have to take advantage of it, not protect your industry and invest in technology.”

And this is all the more important as mature markets, constrained by rising deficits, are not in a position to be motors of growth, he said. Hogan showed a slide summarizing how ABB sees the evolution of the world economy:
• Strong growth in emerging markets
• Stimulus-driven economy with ballooning deficits
• Stable corporate sector with growth in emerging markets
• Weak US consumer sector
• Slow devaluation of dollar
• Commodity-based inflation

The rapid growth of emerging markets with large populations is also behind another trend that Hogan focused on. World energy demand is set to grow 40 percent by 2030, and carbon dioxide emissions will grow by a similar event.

He said almost 60 percent of the solution for cutting carbon emissions is energy efficiency. As an example, he cited a potential $40 billion in savings from energy efficiency with existing technologies in just three industries – cement, aluminum and mining.

As a result, increasing the focus of ABB’s portfolio on solutions for energy efficiency is a priority for the company’s research and development activities. ABB invested more than $1 billion in research and development and he said the company was “committed to increasing spending on R&D throughout the cycle.”

Some first impressions

2010-05-18T05:26:00.003-05:00

The exhibit covering some 9,000 square meters (100,000 square feet) opened on the evening of May 17. We'll take a closer look at some of the technologies on show at a later stage.

Who's writing for this blog?

2010-05-17T13:07:00.010-05:00

I'm Malcolm Shearmur. I work as a writer/editor in ABB's corporate communications team at the Group head office in Zurich, Switzerland. I've been with ABB for four years. I'm particularly interested in the energy challenges facing the world in the 21st century: how can the world meet rapidly rising demand while avoiding irreversible impacts on the climate? I'll be reporting from Automation and Power World for ABB, but any views expressed here are my own and don't necessarily represent those of my employer.