Drax, the UK’s largest provider of renewable electricity and a global bioenergy supplier, needed to get more from its existing data. When Drax replaced its previous data extraction and analysis with AVEVA™ PI System™ and CONNECT, it dramatically improved its data ecosystem. It reduced data errors, increased its data’s accessibility, and enabled efficient and accurate predictive maintenance. Drax can now anticipate and avoid outages with planned repairs—a projected savings of millions of GBP.
“AVEVA PI System with CONNECT increased the amount of data we could pull by a factor of about 10 times, so it went from a few million records every month to tens of millions of records, which is massively helpful in building a predictive model. And it’s allowed us to respond quicker to requests from our engineers.”
Alex Hegarty, Data Science Analyst, Drax
Goals
- Implement a connected industrial data platform to better facilitate Drax’s data science teams.
- Prevent or clear blockages in pellet pipes by monitoring pressure readings.
Challenges
- Data retrieval was performed manually and took a minimum of 30 minutes.
- Data was raw, unprocessed, and of too great volume as a data set for Excel.
- Data scientists had no tools at their disposal to work with live data.
Solutions
Results
- Removed errors from the raw data, making 10+ times more data points accessible.
- Engineers now have near-real-time data to prevent blockages and enable more use cases in the future.
- Fewer expected outages, as repairs now are scheduled and anticipated.
- Potential large savings for each day that generator downtime was prevented.
- Significant number of assets de-risked through analytics-driven alarms and an improved dome scheduling
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