Building a house or renovating an apartment typically involves brute force and noise, frayed nerves, busted budgets and, sometimes, poisoned relations with neighbors. But homeowners in Japan can now rely on software-enabled technology to take out some of the pain.

“Remodeling requires many specific capabilities and techniques, like how to install units without affecting other rooms; or, the ability to control construction noise and vibration,” says Isao Hihara of LIXIL, the Japanese manufacturer of housing materials and equipment. “Sometimes [you need] a team that can say, for example, ‘Let’s use a crane from the narrow alley to load the bathtub into the upper story.’”

Earlier this year, LIXIL Total Service (LTS), a subsidiary that handles installation and maintenance of LIXIL products — everything from bathtubs to high-tech toilets — started using Predix, GE’s cloud-based software platform developed for the Industrial Internet. Typically, Predix handles data generated by jet engines, gas turbines, CT scanners and other big machines. But the versatile platform can handle most professional tasks. LTS uses it to schedule and dispatch the right team to the correct job at the optimal time.

Top and above: A LIXIL bathroom. Images credit: LIXIL

That’s more complicated than it sounds. There are more than 13 million people living in Tokyo and Hihara says that LTS’s branch in the Japanese capital receives orders for some 1,000 bathroom jobs per month. The office has about 50 work teams, each specializing in a different aspect of construction. The mathematical possibilities of who should be where and when can quickly grow astronomical.

That’s where Predix comes in. Last fall, the Japanese telecom and Internet corporation Softbank became the first strategic global partner to license Predix. This year, LTS, GE and SoftBank developed a Predix-based app called Job Scheduler that assigns the optimal team for each construction site depending on certain conditions. They include site location, timeframe, past experience in handling a particular product, ability to use special machines and having skills that match the difficulty of the work. “Whether it was defining the ideal process or developing the user interface, we made sure that we always thought from the perspective of the customer and users,” says Keisuke Toda of GE Digital.

LIXIL has about 50 work teams in Tokyo, each specializing in a different aspect of construction. The mathematical possibilities of who should be where and when can quickly grow astronomical. Image credit: LIXIL

Predix also keeps gathering data, learning from it and keeping tabs on the accomplishments and skill levels of each construction team. The goal is to prevent construction schedule delays and reduce costs. To date, the app is in being used by LTS’s remodeling group and the company hopes to roll it out to other teams in the future.

Says GE Japan’s Tetsuya Nakamura, who leads the collaboration with SoftBank: “In the coming age, the Industrial Internet and software analytics will transform society and the economy in ways that will go beyond our imaginations.” In Japan, the transformation can start in your bathroom.

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John Flannery, GE Healthcare’s chief executive officer, told the Financial Times that when he started his job last year, he “didn’t come with a mandate to do big M&A.” Instead, Flannery, who held many different GE jobs during his 27 years with the company, said he would be focusing on organic growth. He’s taking advantage of GE’s digital industrial transformation and the GE Store, the idea of applying the knowledge from one GE business across other units to speed up innovation and product development.

GE Healthcare has been primarily known for its imaging machines like MRI and CT scanners. “There will always be a need for imaging — if anything it’s going to grow as we have more testing and diagnostics in an ageing population,” Flannery told the FT earlier this week. “But it’s important we don’t just remain a technology box company selling pixels.”

That’s why Flannery introduced the GE Health Cloud earlier this month at the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), the medical imaging industry’s largest trade show. Built on GE’s cloud-based software platform, Predix, the health cloud is designed to be an ecosystem connecting software, hardware and medical devices. It will host data and also help doctors and clinicians collaborate and compare notes and insights as easily as using a social network. Read more about the GE Health Cloud here.

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GE has been around for more than a century, but few years in its history have been as important for the future of the company as the one that’s just ending. GE started transforming itself into the world’s largest digital industrial company by selling GE Capital assets valued at more than $100 billion.

It also acquired Alstom’s power and grid business, the largest acquisition in GE’s history, launched GE Digital and opened its cloud-based software platform for the Industrial Internet, Predix, to the outside world. “We’re the only company that will have the machines, analytics and operating systems,” GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt said in December. “That’s how we’ll play the Industrial Internet.” Immelt said GE’s biggest task in 2016 would be to “keep executing on the digital industrial strategy.” Here are the most important milestones and deals from 2015.

In April, GE Capital said it would sell assets valued at $200 billion by the end of 2017. As of December, the company has closed deals valued at more than $100 billion and signed transactions valued at $154 billion. In 2014, GE Capital successfully completed a public offering of Synchrony Financial shares. GE said a share exchange program following the IPO would contribute to the company’s effort to return more than $90 billion to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks. GE Capital will keep providing jet engine and infrastructure financing for airlines, utilities and other industrial customers.

In March, GE signed an agreement with the Egyptian government to supply the country with turbines and other technology capable of generating 2.6 gigawatts of power, enough to supply 2.5 million Egyptian homes. Some of the turbines were based on technology originally developed for jet engines like the CF6 engine above – the same kind that power many Boeing 747 jumbo jets. The electricity is much needed. Egypt’s economy is growing at 4 percent and its population is quickly expanding, too.

Much of Egypt’s new power generating capacity was in place before the summer heat set in. GE could move fast because of the GE Store, a concept that allows it to share and quickly transfer knowledge and technology across its businesses. The store holds everything from jet engine know-how to advanced materials and next-generation components like silicon carbide semiconductor chips (pictured above).

Last summer, GE launched GE Digital. The new unit will work closely with all GE businesses and help them and their customers take advantage of the Industrial Internet. One new solution is the “digital twin,” a virtual double of wind turbines, jet engines and even the human body animated with real-world data. Digital Twins will help customers predict and respond to problems before they get out of hand.

In September, GE launched Predix, a cloud-based software platform for the Industrial Internet, and opened it to outside developers. Predix is similar to iOS or Android, but built for machines. The platform allows developers to mine industrial data and write apps for everything from CT and MRI scanners  to turbines and jet engines, gather insights and make the machines more efficient.

In October, GE launched Current – a startup that combines energy hardware with digital intelligence. Current’s intelligent LED street lamps can already see and hear things and measure air quality.

In October, GE Transportation signed a $2.6 billion deal to supply 1,000 locomotives to India. In 2015, GE unveiled the Evolution Series Tier 4 locomotive (above), the first freight train engine that meets the U.S. government’s strict Tier 4 emission standards.

In November, GE acquired the energy and grid business of Alstom, including Alstom’s huge Haliade offshore wind turbines shown above. (They will power America’s first offshore wind farm.) The companies’ combined power generation assets can now meet 30 percent of the world’s energy demand.

In 2015, GE Aviation won $35 billion in orders and commitments at airshows in Paris and Dubai.

Textron Aviation, the world’s largest maker of business propeller planes like Beechcraft Bonanza, Baron and King Air, said in November it would use a brand new advanced turboprop engine developed by GE to power its latest single-engine turboprop plane. The engine burns 20 percent less fuel and produces 10 percent more power, compared to engines in its class. The agreement represented a major coup for GE Aviation. A mainstay in the commercial and military jet engine space, the company entered the turboprop space for business aviation only seven years ago, when Pratt & Whitney Canada dominated the market.

In December, GE Healthcare launched the Predix-powered Health Cloud. The cloud and apps will help doctors diagnose and treat everything from stroke to diabetes, and potentially transform healthcare.

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GE Oil & Gas became the latest GE business to launch its own digital division. The unit launched a pilot project with BP to help the energy company reduce unplanned downtime by deploying software and analytics, and partnered with “subsurface” software company Paradigm.

“Digitization has become not only a competitive differentiator but increasingly, a necessity,” said Lorenzo Simonelli, chief executive officer of GE Oil & Gas. “We are evolving our business and digital offerings to match the needs of our customers, partnering with them to embrace the transition and help make their businesses stronger long-term.”

GE spent more than $1 billion on software development over the last several years and opened Predix, its cloud-based software platform for the Industrial Internet, to outside developers. Predix is similar to iOS or Android, the software platforms that power smartphones, but built for machines. Predix allows developers to mine industrial data, gather insights and make machines more efficient. Last fall, GE also launched GE Digital, a new unit that will work closely with all GE businesses and their customers and help them digitize and take advantage of the connected world.

GE hired ABB veteran Matthias Heilmann to run the Oil & Gas Digital Solutions business. He brings more than 20 years of industry expertise in technology, software, operations, and finance.

The pilot project with BP will focus on a new “digital solution” aimed at increasing reliability for BP’s offshore operations in the Gulf of Mexico. GE said the scalable cloud-based system, which will run on Predix, could be quickly deployed around the world at a low cost. “Moving beyond the equipment, the solution will introduce new process surveillance and predictive analytic tools to provide early warnings of potential facility issues,” GE said in a news release.

Dave Feineman, senior advisor for digital technology in BP’s Upstream Technology organization, said that “these digital technologies offer the opportunity to collaboratively develop industry-leading solutions to address some of the most significant challenges in field operations.”

GE is working with Paradigm, a leader in reservoir modeling software and services, on a first-of-its-kind upstream solution for optimizing field level production. It integrates Paradigm’s knowledge of what’s under the surface with GE’s production expertise and technologies. The system could help production operators reduce operating costs by combining information like real-time flow rates and pressures with reservoir data, then analyzing that information to optimize operations. GE said “improving problem detection and treatment design alone can reduce operational costs by 10 to 25 percent through fewer interventions and more efficient resource utilization.”

“Today, production engineers often rely on single well analysis to make production decisions that have field wide impact,” said Arshad Matin, CEO of Paradigm. “Partnering with GE, we can now provide a unified view of both production and reservoir data for optimal decision making.”

GE Oil & Gas is holding its annual meeting next week in Florence, Italy.

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Few people can fathom the sheer size of the World Wide Web, the most visible part of the Internet where we shop, meet friends, read news and watch movies. But the Web will soon be a minnow when compared to the immensity of the Industrial Internet, a fast-growing network connecting machines and devices of all types: from thermostats to thermal power plants.

GE spent $1 billion over the last few years to develop Predix, a cloud-based software platform that has allowed GE to securely collect data from jet engines, gas turbines and MRI scanners, analyze it and then use the results to make them run better. Last fall GE gave access to Predix to a select group of partners and customers like Pitney Bowes, which has used it to optimize massive mail machines that can sort 900 million letters in a year.

This morning, the company took the next step at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona and opened Predix to everyone. “Many companies are looking at what we are doing and they would like to do the same thing independent of GE,” says Harel Kodesh, chief technology officer of GE Digital and one of the architects of Predix. “To unlock the platform’s full potential, we knew we needed to allow developers outside of GE to get their hands on Predix. After all, where would the consumer app and solution ecosystem be without communities of external developers building for iOS, Android or Linux.”

GE also announced in Barcelona a new “digital alliance” with companies like Intel, Capgemini and Infosys, who see Predix as a revenue stream and a valid business opportunity. “There is a huge amount of interest in the Industrial Internet and in the solutions we are offering,” Kodesh says. “People realize that GE is not just another random company that decided to be a software company. We bring something that goes beyond software. We bring the deep, intimate understanding of how the assets can become part of the Internet.” Read our Q&A with Kodesh we conducted on the eve of the Barcelona announcements.

Top and above: Predix can optimize entire power plants and electricity distribution networks. Image credit: GE Power

GE Reports: What is Predix?

Harel Kodesh: Predix is an operating system for the Industrial Internet. It’s not that different from the operating system that you have in your phone or your laptop. But it can handle a lot of data coming from a lot of places at once and keep it secure. We call the huge amount of data hyperscale. Predix also includes features that allow you to develop and run applications that are optimized for the Industrial Internet.

GER: How much data are you talking about?

HK: We have exabytes of data coming in every month. Keep in mind that as operating system plumbers, we do not tell our customers how to build their applications. In health care, for example, if you want to ingest an MRI image, you run 2 to 3 gigabytes per image. If you store tens of thousands of them, you do the numbers. I think that in the next five years, the Industrial Internet will break the zettabyte barrier, which is 1,000 exabytes. (In 2009, the entire World Wide Web contained 500 exabytes.)

GER: How is GE using Predix today?

HK: The GE Health Cloud is one application. It’s something the healthcare team created to support the distribution and manipulation of images. In the energy sector, we are helping Qatar’s RasGas run its liquefied natural gas plant. The digital system allows the operator to know much more about what’s happening in their shop. Most of our businesses are already using it, and we are starting to see the applications getting built. Mind you, this is a very young system, but the ramp-up rate is pretty steep.

GER: You have opened Predix to all users. Why?

HK: Marc Andreessen said that software is eating the world. We see a lot of software enhancements to what used to be industrial companies. In fact, many companies are looking at what we are doing and they would like to do the same thing independent of GE. At the same time, there is a broad spectrum of industrial applications, like running elevators, we would like to target that go beyond what GE is using. To unlock the platform’s full potential, we knew we needed to allow developers outside of GE to get their hands on Predix. After all, where would the consumer app and solution ecosystem be without communities of external developers building for iOS, Android or Linux.

GE is using software and sensors to test its newest Harriet-class gas turbines and expose them to conditions they will likely never see in service. Image credit: GE Power

GER: How do you convince those companies to join you?

HK: When you make an operating system generally available to everybody, you have to solve three major issues. You have to make sure that the system is robust. Otherwise you will spend all of your revenues on customer support. The system has to operate 24/7. We also had to make sure that we could use Predix to run a commercial operation and be able to bill customers and also allow them to review their invoices. Basically, you have to be able to register and also to swipe your credit card. Finally, Predix has to scale. It’s very difficult to get that sense if you have one user. We want to assure people that it’s going to run even when they start piling applications on top of it. That’s why we ran the system through beta and limited availability phase last year to make sure that it’s ready for prime time.

GER: Who tested it?

HK: We talked to a lot of people, including executives at Pitney Bowes and Toshiba and LIXIL in Japan. LIXIL manufactures bathroom fixtures, and they used Predix to manage their own maintenance scheduling. Keep in mind that it was a handholding exercise. People came to us and we signed an agreement with them. But now it’s strong enough to just register and go. Look, you don’t have to call Microsoft or Amazon every time you want to use their systems. Predix is the same.

GER: What makes Predix stand out?

HK: We are different. We are only taking industrial players. It’s not because our systems cannot run social apps, but we want to make sure that the cloud is as sterile as it can be for the Industrial Internet. Elevated security is the name of the game. Here’s an example: If you buy a million computing cycles, the owner of a normal operating system will actually give you 900,000 and keep 100,000 for security, administration and other functions. We will give you 500,000 and keep the rest for security. You are getting much more security built in, and obviously you have to pay a little bit more for the cycles. This makes it fundamentally different from any other system. Finally, there are all kinds of structures in the system that are driven by Industrial Internet use cases. For example, we are working with services such as Workflow that manage the flow of patients and keep their records. We have to support potentially hundreds of millions of workflows. We need distributed architecture to do that, but we couldn’t find anything like that on the market. So we had to build it ourselves, but in such a way so we would be able to scale it without a limit.

GER: GE Digital also announced the Global Alliance program today. How is different from the Industrial Internet Consortium?

HK: The two groups serve different needs, and they are both doing great. The IIC is a strategic technology body seeking to standardize components of the Industrial Internet. Our competitors are part of it. Like any consortium, there’s no allegiance that you have to swear before you come in. The Alliance is different. It’s much more commercial and tighter. The members will deploy Predix directly and also through allies like telecommunications service providers that are not going to compete with us. They see Predix as a revenue stream and a valid business opportunity.

The GE Health Cloud will collect and analyze patient data. Image credit: GE Healthcare

HK: The Alliance has a lot of big names coming in, including Intel, Infosys, Deloitte Digital and others. There is a huge amount of interest in the Industrial Internet and in the solutions we are offering. People realize that GE is not just another random company that decided to be a software company. We bring something that goes beyond software. We bring the deep, intimate understanding of how the assets can become part of the Internet. The Industrial Internet is much more massive than the consumer Internet. It’s also newer, so people don’t associate it with Internet at all. It’s a whole new ballgame.

GER: What’s Predix going to look like in a year?

HK: You’ll see tens of thousands of developers working on Predix. That will force us to become an at-scale software company. You’ll see our data centers hosting many, many petabytes of industrial data. The ecosystem will also start feeding on itself, and you’ll see more and more interesting applications. If you look at the Internet as we know it circa 1996, you are at the release of Windows ’95 that allowed browsers to run and launched the Internet revolution. You are going to see things changing. The magic is in the numbers, and you are going to see a very vibrant developer community.

The digital twin can simulate and optimize entire wind farms inside the cloud. Image credit: GE Renewables

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GE spent $1 billion over the last few years to develop Predix, the cloud-based platform that has allowed GE to securely collect data from jet engines, gas turbines and MRI scanners, analyze it and then use the results to make them run better. Last fall GE gave access to Predix to a select group of partners and customers. On Monday, the company took the next step at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and opened Predix to all developers.

“We’ve been pleased,” says Roger Pilc, executive vice president and chief innovation officer at Pitney Bowes, which has been working with Predix for six months. “The data is successfully coming off our machines and through our security systems up into the cloud. The applications running on top of the cloud have been showing our field service teams and our customers the data visualizations we have designed together. So in terms of technology and functionality, things have been going very well.”

Our video explains what open Predix means.

The post Video: Predix Now Open For All Industrial Internet Developers appeared first on GE Reports.

GE opened Predix, its cloud-based operating system for the Industrial Internet, to all users at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday. As of now, companies of all stripes can start using it to write industrial applications and make their machines and factories run better.

But a handful of businesses have had access to a beta version of the system since last fall. Roger Pilc, executive vice president and chief innovation officer at Pitney Bowes, has been developing on Predix for about six months. We talked to him about the experience. Here’s an edited version of the conversation.

GE Reports: How are you using Predix?

Roger Pilc: We leverage physical and digital technologies to help our clients drive business outcomes. We have an enterprise mail business that develops, sells and services very large machines called inserters. The machines help companies like banks and healthcare providers put exactly the right piece of mail inside exactly the right envelope. The scale and speed of the work is tremendous. For one bank alone, our machines helped assemble 900 million mail pieces in one year, just to give you a sense of scale. Most of these machines produce over 20,000 letters per hour and the requirements for accuracy and precision are astronomical. You can’t get it wrong.

This is not an easy feat. We need visibility into the machines to avoid outages and fix the machines before they break down. We also need to understand the root cause of any problems very quickly. Predix is helping us and our customers do that. This is something we didn’t have before.

GER: Is Predix meeting your expectations?

RP: We’ve been pleased. The data is successfully coming off our machines and through our security systems up into the cloud. The applications running on top of the cloud have been showing our field service teams and our customers the data visualizations we have designed together. So in terms of technology and functionality, things have been going very well.

GER: Besides outage prevention, what else are you using Predix for?

RP: So far I’ve mentioned one application, but our customers have a hierarchy of needs. Reducing downtime is the foundation level. The next step is improving productivity.

Predix can do that by using some of the same data from the same sources as in the first example, and applying an additional layer of analytics and different applications. They allow our customers to manage uptime, and also productivity in terms of output and how it relates to the mix of the types of machines, applications and operators in the factory. It gives our customers the analytics to optimize those machines even more.

GER: You talked about reducing downtime and improving output. Anything else?

RP: Helping our clients grow productivity revenue is the third and most advanced level of our use of Predix. When we talked to our customers on the most senior level, they were ultimately most interested in driving more revenue and more profit out of their locations. For that, you need to go even higher with capacity planning and job scheduling. Predix allows you to plan production in a more informed and data-driven manner against a whole fleet of machines. It allows you to place the right applications and analytics on the right machines at the right time, and essentially foresee what will happen in the future.

Here’s another way of looking at it. There’s descriptive analytics, which allows you to describe and visualize what’s happening; there’s prescriptive analytics, which is based on what’s happening — the root causes behind it — and gives you the prescriptions for remediating it; and then there is predictive analytics, which allows you to use data to be able to foresee what will happen and to be able to act in advance of it to optimize outcomes even further.

“The scale and speed of the work is tremendous,” says Roger Pilc of Pitney Bowes. “For one bank alone, our machines helped assemble 900 million mail pieces in one year, just to give you a sense of scale.” Image credit: Pitney Bowes

GER: Have you worked with other Industrial Internet software platforms?

RP: We certainly have experience with other leaders in the industry. We are a large customer of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and we also work with another industrial-strength hosting company. We evaluated Predix thoroughly and were very satisfied with the technology architecture, the level of scalability and the ability to ingest the very large quantities of data that often come from our types of machines. We are also very comfortable with the level of security, which is very important to us and to our customers.

Next, we looked at the actual applications. Here, Predix for us is more like Salesforce.com than AWS. The critical element was the layer of asset performance management applications running on top of the technology and the analytics that informed those applications. The application layer where the data is used to drive the performance of our industrial assets was something that we viewed as the industry leader. Plain-vanilla application-hosting companies do not have that layer.

Finally, and this is also very significant, these Predix-enabled applications are helping us provide more value to our customers, get to better business outcomes and also transform our own operations. We are using Predix to transform our own service organization from a break-fix model to an increasingly consultative one informed by data and analytics. We want to engage with customers in a way that’s more directly related to business outcomes.

GER:That sounds similar to what GE is doing inside its own factories.

RP: We placed value with GE because they not only built the data and analytics platform, but also because of the journey they’ve been on for the last several years. They’ve been using data from their own machines, doing the data analytics and then ultimately evolving their own services organization in the exact same way as us. That was an important element to us. We speak regularly not just about the technology and the applications, but also about this digital-industrial transformation.

GER: How has it been working with GE so far?

RP: It’s been very good. First of all, I think that our two companies have an amazing cultural fit. We both care a lot about our customers, we try to do the right thing the right way and we both have a high bar in terms of the quality of our engineering. We also share GE’s strong focus on innovation, meaning that we try to meet customer needs very quickly by doing things differently and introducing new physical and digital technologies.

GER: What are your plans in the future?

RP: We’re a $3.6 billion company with 1.5 million clients. In addition to the mailing machines, which are a relatively small part of our business, we are leaders in software and analytics around geospatial and location intelligence and customer information management. We are now using Predix to develop apps around those services and offer them to customers through the Predix app store.

Any Predix customer can use these capabilities, from fleet management businesses to drilling companies. Location management is a fundamental enabler. I’m sure other companies will be writing apps leveraging these capabilities as well. This is the power of the Predix ecosystem.

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Speaking last fall from Studio 8H inside New York’s 30 Rockefeller Plaza — best known as the set of “Saturday Night Live” — GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt told a crowd of investors and analysts how he was turning the 138-year-old business into the world’s largest digital-industrial company. He wasn’t joking. “We’re the only company that will have the machines, analytics and operating systems,” he said. “That’s how we’ll play the Industrial Internet.”

Immelt expanded on the theme in his annual letter to shareowners, which GE released today. He wrote that the Internet, which has had a massive impact on consumer productivity and commerce, is now transforming industry. “We are a company that invests in broad industrial transitions, and they don’t come much bigger than the full application of data and analytics to machines and systems,“ Immelt wrote. “Sensors on our products send constant streams of data, analyzed and translated into upgrades that drive productivity in industries where even the smallest incremental efficiency can mean very large gains.”

Immelt said that for GE alone, applications and analytics running off Predix, GE’s cloud-based platform for the Industrial Internet, will generate $500 million in productivity savings this year. The platform is now open to all developers. Immelt wrote that by the end of 2016, “we expect to have 200,000 assets under management, 100 GE applications and 20,000 developers” working with Predix. He said that GE revenue from apps and software stood at $5 billion and is growing at 20 percent annually.

One “killer” Predix app is the digital twin, a software model of a physical machine or a process that makes it possible to manage its “real world” sibling better. “GE is creating living digital profiles of [more than] 500,000 industrial machines in the field to provide new opportunities for customer growth and productivity,” he wrote. Immelt wrote that when GE applied it to the GE90, the world’s largest and most powerful jet engine, the digital twin increased fleet availability while saving tens of millions of dollars in unnecessary service overhauls.

The digital power plant is one application of the digital twin. Image credit: GE Power

All GE businesses, from Healthcare to Oil & Gas, can use Predix. The range illustrates another key concept that Immelt calls the GE Store. “The Store allows GE to innovate at scale, investing more than our peers and spreading the innovation across more businesses,” he wrote. As a result, Immelt said, “over the last five years, our organic growth has averaged 5 percent, two times our industrial peer group. And, since 2011, our margins have grown from 14.8 percent to 17.0 percent.”

The digital transformation and the GE Store are both reflected in the spirit of the 2015 Annual Report, which opens with Immelt’s letter. The immersive document, rich with interactive graphics and released online today, allows users to explore GE Store case studies, technologies and business results. CEOs of all GE businesses contributed their own letters to shareowners, and GE will make them available one after another over the next week.

Immelt concluded his letter with an appeal to investors. “I am asking investors to join GE as we transform and execute,” he wrote. “We have delivered for you in the last five years. But we are still underowned by big investors. In this time of uncertainty, why not GE? We have great businesses, global scale and strong initiatives. We have a ton of cash that can protect you. And we will lead the Industrial Internet. We are the Digital Industrial. We have grit. … Join us as we create the next wave of growth.”

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When the large Pakistani textile maker Sapphire Group wanted to secure a reliable supply of electricity for its mills recently, it didn’t just build a new power plant. The company used a technology called digital twin to model the entire plant inside the cloud, run simulations and come up with the optimal way to design and run it.

In Ireland, the operators of the Whitegate Power Station, near Cork, placed more than 140 sensors throughout the plant. They digitize vibrations, temperature and other data, and feed it into the cloud for analysis. The results help the plant managers monitor and optimize operations in real time. The idea is to improve efficiency and minimize downtime at the 445-megawatt plant, which supplies up to 10 percent of Ireland’s households with electricity.

On the French Riviera, near Nice, another piece of software managing a smart grid is helping a municipality juggle different energy sources and pick the most efficient one.

The digital glue that connects these technologies is Predix, the cloud-based platform for the Industrial Internet developed by GE. “We’ve pulled together all of our software offerings, sensors and domain-specific applications for the power and electricity industry,” says Ganesh Bell, chief digital officer for GE Power, who also runs GE Power’s new Digital Solutions business. “From now on, we’ll be just another GE Power business like nuclear, gas power systems and steam.”

GE has spent $1 billion over the last few years to develop Predix. The platform has allowed GE to securely collect data from jet engines, gas turbines and MRI scanners, analyze it and then use the results to make machines run better. The platform is now open to all developers.

“People are starting to realize that digital technologies are the most potent tool for driving value and efficiency in the energy industry,” Bell says. “We can use it to maximize total plant and grid performance and create new business models that reach all the way to consumers. Imagine if your utility was your best friend, using software to provide reliable electricity, drive decarbonization and even help you participate in the energy market by allowing you to sell back into the grid the electricity you make with the solar panels on your roof. This is happening now.”

The opportunities are huge. For starters, the world needs to add a lot of power — as much as 50 percent of existing capacity over the next two decades. Experts estimate that 1.3 billion people still live without access to a reliable supply of electricity.

To fix that, countries will need not only turbines and generators, but also software to get the most out of the machines. A study released by the World Economic Forum in January estimated that optimizing how electricity gets delivered over the grid from power plants to customers could save between $440 billion to $1.2 trillion, while lowering peak demand, reducing emissions and creating new jobs.

Right now, Bell says, GE is the only company that knows how to make both the machines that make electricity and the software that runs them. “We understand the industrial and the digital side,” he says. “The utilities that embrace digital will redefine the industry. They will be the leaders.”

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The cover story in the new issue of Bloomberg Businessweek takes stock of GE’s transformation into a digital-industrial company and explains how “GE became a 124-year-old startup.” The magazine writes that a decade after he took over, the long bet GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt took “on the Internet of Really Big Things seems to be paying off.”

The story tracks GE’s digital transformation from its inception after the financial crisis in 2008. It started with a broad idea. “I said, ‘Look, we need to start building analytic capability, big data capability, and let’s do it in California,’” Immelt told the magazine. “That was as sophisticated as my original thinking was.”

In 2011, Immelt hired Bill Ruh from Cisco to become his digital lieutenant. According to the magazine, Ruh was “impressed by Immelt’s vision and his willingness to admit that he didn’t fully know what he was doing.”

The digital power plant is one of Industrial Internet applications. Image credit: GE Power

“Basically, Jeff said, ‘Look, we’re on Step 1 of a 50-step process, and I just need you to help me figure out what to do because I can only see out one or two steps,’” Ruh, who now runs GE Digital, told Bloomberg Businessweek.

Immelt has invested $1 billion in software and Ruh and his brand-new team moved quickly to develop Predix, GE’s cloud-based operating system for the Industrial Internet. In 2015, GE earned $5 billion in software revenue.

“The company developed applications for Predix enabling it to ingest and analyze vast amounts of data from sensor-equipped machines much like Amazon.com, Facebook, and Google do with information generated by their human customers,” Bloomberg Businessweek wrote. “Immelt wanted to speed Predix’s development and use it on GE’s own equipment. That meant the entire company had to embrace the new operating system, even the power division, which usually took years to design turbines.”

The magazine noted that customers like Pitney Bowes and Toshiba have also already started using Predix, an important step for GE to become one of the top 10 software companies. “The Industrial Internet is going to be the dark matter of the Internet,” Harel Kodesh, chief technology officer for GE Digital, told Bloomberg Businessweek. “It’s something you don’t see, but it is actually the bulk of what’s happening on the Internet.”

The magazine also pointed out the cultural change that has been taking place inside GE. One key new idea, which GE calls FastWorks, came from the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Eric Ries, author of “The Lean Startup.” “I’m tired of hearing five-year plans,” Ries remembers Immelt telling him, according to the magazine. You can read the story here and watch a video with the author.

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There are few people with better first-hand knowledge of the Internet’s history than AOL founder Steve Case. That’s why we should pay attention when he proclaims we haven’t seen anything yet. “The Third Wave is the era when the Internet stops belonging to Internet companies,” he writes in his new book, The Third Wave. “It is the era when the term ‘Internet-enabled’ will start to sound as ludicrous as the term ‘electricity-enabled,’ as if either were notable differentiators.”

In many ways, Case is channeling people like GE Power’s Chief Digital Officer Ganesh Bell, who, after writing software for two decades in Silicon Valley, realized that the next software company wouldn’t be a software company at all. “Everyone has access to cloud, big data and software talent,” he says. “It’s the companies with deep industry domain in machines, infrastructure and operations expertise that will have the upper hand. The future of software is building digital businesses.”

Few companies understand this better than GE, which makes gas turbines and jet engines and also the software that allows customers to link them to the Industrial Internet, unlock their full potential and harvest big productivity gains. One of the drivers of these gains is software called asset performance management (APM) and GE brought it this week to the Hannover Messe industrial technology fair, which is taking place in Germany. “This is the kind of software that programmers in sandals can’t dream up in a garage,” says Jeremiah Stone, general manager for APM at GE Digital. “Industrial productivity has been at a plateau in recent years. We want to really change that so that companies see double-digit productivity improvements.”

GE has been making “big iron” since it opened for business 124 years ago. People like Stone are now mining this domain knowledge and pairing it with data analytics to get insights and get the machines optimized. His business helped GE develop APM software for mining equipment, refineries, oil platforms, wind farms and even airlines. It runs on Predix, GE’s open, cloud-based system for the Industrial Internet.

The potential savings quickly add up. GE estimates that in oil and gas exploration and development, for example, a 1 percent improvement in capital use over 15 years would save $90 billion in avoided or deferred capital spending. In commercial aviation, 1 percent in fuel savings would net $30 billion over 15 years. And a 1 percent improvement in efficiency at the world’s gas-fired power plants would save $66 billion over 15 years.

Machines with sensors that can alert their operators before they fail are also cheaper to fix. Stone notes that companies that wait for equipment to fail spend an average of 13 percent of replacement asset value annually on maintenance. Companies that employ proactive condition-based maintenance, by contrast, face a slim cost of just 2 percent. Stone says that 11 percentage-point spread between the worst companies and the best-performing companies is where APM comes in, saving customers millions of dollars.

One early APM adopter is Qatar’s RasGas, a liquefied natural gas producer that generates 45 percent of the country’s GDP. Other customers like Pitney Bowes write their own apps on Predix to optimize their equipment, and GE is also using the platform to make its factories work better.

One big reason why this is happening is Moore’s law. “Computers and other digital advances are doing for our mental power – the ability to use our brains to understand and shape our environments – what the steam engine and its descendants did for muscle,” write Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in the book The Second Machine Age. “They are allowing us to blow past previous limitation and into a new territory.”

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From Thomas Edison to former President Ronald Reagan and novelist Kurt Vonnegut, GE has employed a number of luminaries since its founding 124 years ago. One famous name missing from this list was Spielberg.

Long before GE started connecting machines to the Industrial Internet, one Arnold Spielberg helped revolutionize computing when he designed the GE-225 mainframe computer in the late 1950s. The machine allowed a team of Dartmouth University students and researchers to develop the BASIC programming language, an easy-to-use coding tool that quickly spread and ushered in the era of personal computers. Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs all used the language when they started building their digital empires.

“I remember visiting the plant when Dad was working on the GE-225,” Arnold’s son, the Hollywood director Steven Spielberg, told GE Reports. “I walked through rooms that were so bright, I recall it hurting my eyes. Dad explained how his computer was expected to perform, but the language of computer science in those days was like Greek to me. It all seemed very exciting, but it was very much out of my reach until the 1980s, when I realized what pioneers like my dad had created were now the things I could not live without.”

The Dartmouth team ran BASIC, or Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, on the GE-225 for the first time a half century ago, on May 1, 1964.

Arnold Spielberg, who is now 99, has been fascinated with electronics from an early age. “[It] was sort of a way of life for me, because I started playing around with radios when I was about eight or nine years old,” he told Anne Frantilla, a historian from the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota.

During World War II, he served as the communications chief of a U.S. bomb squadron in India, and later started making early vacuum tube computers at RCA Corporation. GE engineer Homer R. “Barney” Oldfield hired Spielberg to set up GE’s Industrial Computer Department in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1957.

The department’s name, however, was a ruse. Unlike Oldfield, Ralph Cordiner, then GE chairman and CEO, didn’t want to make business computers. “Every time a plan was sent to him that mentioned going into business computers, he would write ‘No’ across it and send it back,” Arnold Spielberg told Frantilla. Cordiner apparently believed that an industrial company should make products for industry.

Still, Oldfield forged ahead without Cordiner’s blessing. Spielberg and his colleague Charles Propster, whom he brought from RCA, designed the GE-225 in 1959. It was a 20-bit computer that filled an entire room and contained 1,000 circuit boards, 10,000 transistors and 20,000 diodes. It stored data on disks, magnetic tapes, punch cards and paper tapes. It also allowed operators sitting at up to 11 external terminals to access the memory independently. The possibility of this embryonic form of personal computing led the Dartmouth team to develop BASIC.

When Cordiner found out what the team was doing, it was too late. They already had Bank of America as a customer. “[He] came out to attend the dedication ceremonies and promptly fired Barney Oldfield right after the ceremony for violating his rules,” Arnold Spielberg told Frantilla. “He gave the company 18 months to get out of the business.”

It took longer than that. The GE-225, which cost $250,000, was a hit, and the marketing team described early orders as a “landslide.” The business sold dozens of them to customers and also to other GE units “The GE-225 can add 30,000 six-digit numbers in one second and can calculate the ages of every man, woman and child in Schenectady in 5 seconds,” wrote the Schenectady Works News, a GE newspaper. One machine working at the First Union National Bank in North Carolina predicted the results of the 1964 Johnson-Goldwater presidential race within 5 percentage points, reported the GE Monogram magazine. The Cleveland Browns football team used a GE-225 to manage season ticket sales. “Who knows,” quipped the Browns’ president, Art Modell, in 1966, “there might come a time when computers will help call the next play.”

Arnold Spielberg left GE in 1963, the same year Dartmouth’s “BASIC team” traveled to Arizona to learn how to program the equipment. GE sold the computer division to Honeywell in 1970. The IEEE Computer Society recognized Spielberg as a computer pioneer in 2006 for “contribution to real-time data acquisition and recording that significantly contributed to the definition of modern feedback and control processes.”

GE’s current chairman and CEO — and Dartmouth graduate — Jeff Immelt has, in a sense, finally carried out Cordiner’s vision of industrial computing. The company developed Predix, an open cloud-based software platform for the Industrial Internet. Companies of all kinds are now using it to write industrial applications and make their machines and factories run better.

To quote a Hollywood title, for GE it’s back to the future.

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For futurist and X Prize Foundation founder Peter Diamandis, times have been always been a-changin’. But never as much as right now. “We are in a period when extraordinary things are starting to happen,” Diamandis said last week at the Exponential Manufacturing summit in Boston, an event held by Singularity University, the future-facing think tank/startup incubator that Diamandis co-founded with the legendary inventor Ray Kurzweil eight years ago. “You have to surf on top of the tsunami of change or you will be crushed by it.”

One of the “exponential” concepts discussed at the conference was the digital thread, a kind of a digital birth certificate that will allow companies to monitor products at every stage of their life, from birth to death. Andre Wegner, founder and CEO of the 3D-printing strategy firm Authentise, told the audience — which included more than 500 entrepreneurs, engineers, investors and inventors — that parts will soon come equipped with sensors that will report back to the design system when the component breaks. The system will use the data to generate insights, redesign the microstructure of the material the part was made from and send it to the factory floor for manufacturing.

GE businesses have already started deploying parts of the digital thread. Take a look.

Top image: Top image: Additive manufacturing engineer Brian Adkins at GE’s new Center for Additive Technology Advancement (CATA) in Pittsburgh. Image credit: GE Reports/Chris New Above: GE Oil & Gas first introduced the digital thread at its factory in Florence. Image credit: Getty Images

At the GE Oil & Gas turbine factory in Florence, Italy, technicians placed dozens of sensors on massive lathes and boring, milling and grinding machines on the shop floor and inside the inventory room. They monitor heat, vibrations, engineering tolerances and other factors. The data flows into the cloud for analysis and sends back insights that allow experienced human operators to make the best production decisions. “The algorithms send back five to 10 parameters that really make an impact,” says Anup Sharma, chief information officer at GE Oil & Gas. “The information is so good it’s basically like allowing an airplane mechanic to fly a plane.”

GE workers in Italy make massive power modules like the one above, which was designed for the Gorgon natural gas field in Australia. Image credit: GE Oil & Gas

The technology allowed GE to add a whole new production line to the Florence factory — which was already very competitive — without building a new production hall or adding a new shift. “It’s helping them to squeeze more out of their facilities,” says Stephan Biller, chief manufacturing scientist at GE Global Research, who helped develop the digital thread. “I can go in and see what happens if I take a machine out. The factory will reoptimize itself instantly and the system will tell me what the consequences of adding or taking away resources are.”

GE’s digital thread unspools from Predix, a cloud-based platform GE developed at its software headquarters in San Ramon, California, for the Industrial Internet. Predix is similar to iOS or Android, but built for machines. The platform allows developers to mine industrial data and write apps for everything from MRI scanners and jet engines to entire production facilities like offshore platforms and factories. The software supplies insights to operators who use them to make the machines run more efficiently.

GE engineer Vinson Blanton stands next to Autonomous Prime. The robot uses LIDAR eyes to move heavy parts around the factory. “It learns the room,” he says. “It can actually see us.” The new plant is training robots to handle “dirty, difficult, dangerous and dull tasks.” Images credit: GE Power

GE Power’s brand-new Advanced Manufacturing Works in Greenville, South Carolina, has also started using the technology. Clay Johnson, GE Power’s chief information officer, says the plant still shows only a fragment of what’s coming. He says the digital thread will be constantly moving data from customers and suppliers to GE and back. “The system will be getting real-time feedback from sensors on parts inside machines,” Johnson says. “In the future the part will realize it’s getting degraded, automatically can reorder itself to be made, and schedules the field engineer to be on-site to install it. It’s Uber for industry.”

“We’re trying to weave a digital thread around the entire railroad operation,” says GE Transportation’s Chief Digital Office Seth Bodnar

There are some 21,000 GE locomotives pulling freight and passengers in 50 countries and Seth Bodnar, chief digital officer of GE Transportation, wants to connect them all. “We’re trying to weave a digital thread around the entire railroad operation,” Bodnar says. “The good news is small improvements can have a big impact. A 1 percent fuel-efficiency improvement has a $100 million savings benefit for customers. An increase in velocity of just 1 mile per hour can drive over $2 billion in savings to customers.” GE made the first locomotive more than a century ago, and Bodnar says the new software builds on this deep domain expertise. “A decade from now, these digital tools will take railroad productivity and efficiency to unprecedented levels,” he says. “The whole network will light up like a brain.”

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the new cell therapy center in January 2016. Image credit: GE Reports

GE and the Canadian government are each investing CA$20 million in a new cell therapy research and process development hub in Toronto led by Canada’s Centre for Commercialization of Regenerative Medicine (CCRM). The new center will bring together researchers, universities, drug manufacturers and technology companies like GE to speed up the development and production of cell therapies and make them available to patients more quickly. “Cell therapy has the potential to cure everything from cancer to diabetes,” says Phil Vanek, general manager for cell therapy technologies at GE Healthcare. “But we need to make it affordable and scalable. In this era of increasing scrutiny of medical costs and reimbursement, we have to help our customers achieve a reasonable cost of goods.” Since cell therapy involves harvesting and reengineering the patient’s own cells, Vanek says, software and sensors could allow manufacturers to keep a digital chain of custody of those cells. “It could allow us to track cells through the whole reprogramming and manufacturing process,” he says. “We could run real-time analytics during the process and then ultimately follow the patient results. Since every patient introduces a level of biological variability, we envision smart systems in the future that could adapt the production process in real-time depending on the biology that’s coming in.”

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If you want to see the future of electricity, grab an espresso and head to Northern Italy. There, just outside the industrial city of Turin, the combination of renewable energy, traditional generation and a high-voltage cable from France has created more power supply than the region can absorb. So much so, in fact, the glut took at least one decades-old power plant out of commission in 2013. “If you are losing money, you don’t want to invest more if you have no clue whether you are ever going to get it back,” says Mario Cincotta, general manager of multi-year agreements for GE’s Power Services business in Europe.

But Cincotta’s business came back with a solution. He and his team analyzed the local energy segment, upgraded the plant’s natural gas turbine with new technology and software and figured out how to start and stop it 2.5 times faster. The speed is critical to helping the plant ramp up when the wind stops blowing and the grid needs power.

The Chivasso power plant opened in the 1950s. Image credit: A2A

Cincotta says the project started as a data mining exercise.

His team first gathered public data about energy prices and distribution from the area around the plant, which is located in the commune of Chivasso just north of Turin. They used special software used by GE’s energy trading group to model the regional electricity demands. “We ran analysis and simulations on the micro and macro levels, what capacity would be needed and how quickly,” Cincotta says.

They first got the bad news. They realized that even with the right technology upgrades, a brand new plant nearby using Siemens turbines would still be able to beat the customer, the Italian utility A2A, from a cost perspective. But when they bundled the upgrades with GE’s asset performance management software built on Predix, the company’s cloud-based operating platform for the Industrial Internet, the story turned from dark to hopeful. “We ran the analysis and we saw there was money available to play for and win,” Cincotta says.

One of Chivasso’s original turbines. Image credit: A2A

GE Power presented the findings to A2As engineers and traders and convinced them to try to fire up the turbine again. They first installed a new type of combustor on GE’s 9FA gas turbines powering the plant that improved the turbine’s response times and also allowed it to operate within the emissions envelope set by Italian regulators. “The technology turned an airplane into a space shuttle, but now we needed the data and software to drive it,” Cincotta says. “Without them, the power plant would be just a fancy toy.”

He and his team started funneling data from sensors inside the turbine into software applications built on Predix. “We basically built a black box that allowed us to monitors the unit’s physics and mechanical performance and make it work harder,” Cincotta says.

Cincotta says the upgrade now allows A2A to respond to the grid when it needs more power, simulate grid conditions, make the plant available and respond quickly in a profitable way. “They now have a system that allows them to manage complex data easily,” he says. “Otherwise it’s a nightmare, like manually flying a spaceship.”

A brand new gas turbine at GE Power’s gas turbine factory – the world’s largest –  in Greenville, South Carolina. Image credit: GE Reports/Chris New

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When Credit Lyonnais built itself a grand new office near the Opera in the center of Paris in the 1870s, it used a piece of the Louvre as a model and commissioned Gustave Eiffel’s atelier to design its soaring glass canopy.

Even today, the building remains a big draw for new generations of engineers. Except this breed doesn’t use steel beams and glass to shape the world. They write software to control machines.

Starting this fall, the top two floors of Le Centorial, as the building is known, will belong to GE Digital’s first global “digital foundry,” a collaborative space where coders, data scientists and app developers can incubate new startups and work with customers on new software applications. “The digital revolution involves looking for needles of value in haystacks of big data,” says Robert Plana, the foundry’s first incubation and ecosystem director. “It’s difficult for any company to proceed alone. We’ll use the foundry to design fast solutions with partners, test them and release the best and most disruptive ones into the real world.”

Above: The GE “digital foundry” in Paris will open in August 2016. It will employ 250 data scientists, engineers and designers by 2018.  Top image: Gustave Eiffel’s atelier designed the foundry’s soaring glass canopy.

GE has been aggressively seeking new ways to enter the software field for a while. Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt, who calls GE the “world’s largest digital-industrial company,” inaugurated the foundry on Monday evening, before GE’s Minds + Machines, which starts Tuesday.

GE spent $1 billion to open a new software headquarters in San Ramon, California, where its engineers developed Predix, a cloud-based operating system for the Industrial Internet. “We’re the only company that will have the machines, analytics and operating systems,” Immelt said. “Europe has the talent and infrastructure to lead a productivity revolution and the digitization of industry must be at the core of this mission.”

The exterior of the Le Centorial building in Paris where GE will open the first digital foundry outside the U.S.

The Paris foundry will open in August 2016 and employ 250 data scientists, engineers and designers by 2018. It will be the first in a global network of GE’s digital foundries, stretching from San Ramon and Boston in the U.S. to Dubai and Shanghai.

The Paris foundry will bring tech mavens together to use Predix to develop applications for machines and factories, as well as speed up the development of third-party software. They will also reach out to academics, startups developing software for industry and institutions like NUMA, the first startup “accelerator” in France.

“The digitization of industry in Europe requires not only leadership and investment from companies such as GE and our partners, but also more collaboration between the private and public sectors,” said Bill Ruh, chief executive of GE Digital. “We are building an open platform, where GE’s 14,000 developers can collaborate with our customers and partners to create new applications.”

The post New “Digital Foundry” In Paris Expands GE’s Global Software Footprint appeared first on GE Reports.

GE just picked up a head of steam and put it in the cloud.

It was just in April that GE Power, the GE business that makes power generation equipment, acquired the Boston-based machine learning and data analytics startup NeuCo Inc., which uses software and artificial intelligence to improve the efficiency of coal-fired power plants. These power plants burn coal to boil water and then use the steam to spin turbines and generate electricity. They are the most common source of electricity, providing around 40 percent of the world’s electric power.

NeuCo’s code and neural networks are now part of the world’s first “Digital Power Plant for Steam,” a set of digital technologies that can dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions by improving the operations and efficiency of coal-fired power plants. GE made the announcement at the Minds + Machines Europe conference, which is taking place today in Paris.

GE says it could help eliminate 500 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions if deployed at all existing coal-fired power plants globally. That’s the same as removing 120 million cars from the road – or every tenth car in the world – or covering Earth with carbon-trapping forest the size of Europe.

The technology is “equipment-agnostic,” which means it can optimize machines made by any manufacturer, says Ganesh Bell, GE Power’s chief digital officer. “Utilities will need to generate 50 percent more electricity than they do today by 2040 and meet ambitious goals to cut emissions set by COP21,” says Bell, referring to the United Nations climate change conference that took place in Paris last year. “Using data science, software and intelligent automation to optimize every aspect of the electricity value chain – from generation to delivery and consumption – will do both.”

Above: GE’s Ganesh Bell says data and software will help utilities “generate half as much electricity as they do today by 2040 and meet ambitious goals to cut emissions set by COP21.” Image credit: GE Reports. Top image: GE’s “ultra supercritical” steam turbine. The water pressure inside reaches 4,000 pounds per square inch, more than what’s exerted when a bullet strikes a solid object. Image credit: GE Power

Bell says the new Digital Power Plant for Steam (or DPP for Steam) software interprets data from more than 10,000 sensors located across the steam power plant and can increase efficiency by as much as 2 percent. It can make the boiler perform better – that’s where NeuCo’s neural nets come in – but also analyze coal quality to reduce fuel use and create what Bell calls a “digital twin” of the entire plant inside the cloud that can identify any gaps between actual and ideal performance.

GE also has a deep knowledge of steam turbines, another critical part of coal-fired plants. It acquired Alstom’s large global portfolio of steam turbines with its energy business last fall. “The combination of the physical strengths of our legacy Alstom steam technologies and GE’s digital systems can help our customers optimize their power plants and make them more efficient, lower emissions and reduce cost,” says Andreas Lusch, president of GE’s Steam Power Systems.

GE Reports editor Tomas Kellner sat down with Bell before the Minds + Machines Europe conference to discuss the technology. Here’s an edited version of their conversation.

Germany’s RDK8 is the world’s most efficient coal-fired power plant. Image credit: GE Power

GE Reports: Why did you develop the Digital Power Plant for Steam?

Ganesh Bell: When we digitized the wind farm last year, we allowed operators to build the most efficient wind farm and then run it in the most optimal fashion. The DPP for Steam is similar.

Our customers are ultimately in the business of generating and transmitting electrons. They are interested in doing it in the most reliable, effective and productive way from a mix of different fuel sources. But they are also facing a lot of challenges ranging from reducing emissions to plant longevity and fuel price. Our software is helping them to find the best solution and the best mix.

GER: How so?

GB: The average utility can generate power in many different ways, using wind, natural gas, coal or nuclear fuel. But the mix is different in every market, based on demand, regulations, fuel availability and other conditions. Our software will help our customers optimize all of their power generation options, select the best combination and make sure they hit their marks. In Europe, for example, they have to comply with very strict emissions.

GER: Why is coal still so important? Aren’t we trying to get rid of it?

GB: Coal is still a big part of the picture, whether you like it or not. People don’t like to talk about it, but the majority of power generation in many parts of the world is still from coal and it’s not going away. Here’s the challenge: our customers have sunk a lot of money in coal-fired plants and they expect to run them for decades. But in the post-COP21 world, they may not be able to because they won’t comply. We’re now giving them more options to run their assets by rejuvenating their operations with software.

GER: Give me an example.

GB: Take something simple like coal. Its quality varies in different parts of the world but also batch from batch. You have to optimize the power plant for the particular type you have. Today, you set the parameters once and you forget it. But our system is continuously learning and optimizing. This kind of technology is not available today. We figured that just this part of the digital power plant for steam could reduce fuel consumption by 4,400 tons of coal per year with the same megawatt of output in a single steam power plant.

GER: Does it matter who built the power plant?

GB: No. It doesn’t. It doesn’t matter whether the power plant has machines built by GE, Siemens or Skoda. The software is fully technology-agnostic. In fact, we can extend it beyond coal to plants burning other kinds of fuel like biomass and oil.

GER: What is the big picture here?

GB: Like I said, smart utilities are moving from power generation to optimizing their entire energy mix based on the fuel source. Already the power in your home can include electrons from coal, nuclear power as well as wind, depending on demand, weather, regulations and a number of other factors. We started by optimizing turbines at the asset level, then we moved to power plants across the fleet, and now the next logical step is optimizing all of power generation.

GER: How will you do that?

GB: That’s why GE developed Predix, the cloud-based operating system for the Industrial Internet. The Digital Power Plant for Steam, for gas, the Digital Wind Farm; all of these solutions are all built on the same Predix platform. With Predix, you now have an enterprise-wide view of all generation and all of data in a single secure cloud. That gives you new, interesting opportunities to solve hard problems.

GER: Like what?

GB: In Europe, for example, Predix allows you to manage how you integrate renewables better into the mix. It gives you new demand flexibility and helps you compensate quickly with traditional fuel sources when the wind stops blowing. We can now make all kinds of power coexist and work together.

The post Full Steam Ahead: This Software Brain For Coal-Fired Power Plants Could Help Eliminate 500 Million Tons Of CO2 appeared first on GE Reports.

The city of Briançon sits in a mountainous corner of France that has become a popular destination for cycling fans, who flock to the punishing Tour de France stages there. But it may soon become a required stop for the energy geeks too.

That’s because a dam in the hills above the city recently started testing new software that allows the operators to monitor power generation in a new, revolutionary way.

The French city of Briancon may soon become a required stop for the energy geeks. Image credit: Getty Images Top image: A Francis turbine. Image credit: GE Renewable Energy

The dam above Briançon, called Pont Baldy, is relatively small – its Francis turbine can generate just 5 megawatts, enough for 3,000 homes in the valley below. But it heralds big changes.

In the past, utilities used hydropower to supply stable, base-load electricity, the minimum amount of power needed to meet demand. But that’s no longer enough, says Elisabeth Atheaux, the controls product platform leader at GE Renewable Energy. “Most water turbines are designed to produce power at a sweet spot where the output is most efficient,” Atheaux says. “But utilities are increasingly using wind and other intermittent sources to produce electricity, and they want flexible sources of power that can quickly ramp up production on the grid when the wind stops blowing.”

Operators traditionally have used gas turbines to pick up the slack, but hydropower coupled with data and analytics can be more effective.

The local utility Energie Développement Services du Briançonnais (EDSB) opened Pont Baldy in a deep, narrow valley of the Cerveyrette River in 1970 to meet spikes in power demand. In December, GE engineers installed a new acquisition and data processing platform at the site and started collecting and analyzing information such as acceleration on bearings, displacements and temperature from sensors on the small Francis turbine. “It allows us to monitor the entire system and diagnose the health of the machine, just like a doctor checking a patient’s blood pressure, temperature or any necessary real-time datasets,” says Vincent Bouillet, program manager for monitoring and diagnostics for hydropower at GE Renewable Energy.

Here’s why that’s important. A water dam may look like a really big spigot, but it doesn’t behave like one. While the faucet in the kitchen allows you to move easily from closed to open and fill a glass with water running at different speeds, hydropower dams are different. “There are certain forbidden areas in the power range where the water flow becomes turbulent, starts resembling a vortex rope and could damage the turbine,” Atheaux says. “When the load is lower, you can have vibrations. It’s like driving a car in the wrong gear. The danger forced operators to stay near the sweet spot and locked them to a constant output.”

The software is gathering information from sensors located in key parts of the turbine. Image credit: GE Renewable Energy

But with wind and solar energy streaming online – France’s installed wind capacity is more than 10,000 megawatts – they need to do more. “We need our machines to operate from zero output to 100 percent to help accommodate all that power,” Bouillet says. “The software is the key that can unlock the full range of the machines.”

Since December, the GE system has collected and analyzed more than 7 terabytes of data from the turbine. It also digested three years’ worth of temperature, maintenance and downtime data collected by the utility.

The utility and also GE engineers in Grenoble, where GE designs and makes hydro turbines, can access the data on their screen through a custom-designed 3D “human-to-machine” interface that turns the information into interactive objects. “The system is not just the software, but also the way we communicate the data in an intuitive way. We are thinking about the next generation of customers influenced by the smartphone,” says Bouillet, who designed the interface.

Atheaux, Bouillet and their teams are now expanding the system’s machine-learning capacity by connecting it to Predix, a cloud-based operating system GE developed for the Industrial Internet. Predix will allow them to compare and learn from data gathered from many dams and multiple machines. They are already planning new applications in Europe and the U.S. “We are living in a data revolution that gives our machines more power,” Bouillet says. “It makes things that were impossible just a few years ago a reality.”

The Pont Baldy dam. Image credit: GE Renewable Energy

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A brand-new GE factory in Florida is feeding production data into evolutionary algorithms built on Predix — GE’s cloud-based operating system for the Industrial Internet — to essentially apply the principles of natural selection to capacitors and develop better products.

In the French Alps, a team of hydro engineers are using the system’s machine-learning capacity to link water turbines to the internet and bring more renewable energy onto the grid. It allows the turbine to pick up the slack when the wind stops blowing.”

And in Italy, algorithms built on Predix allowed a local utility to analyze the energy market, optimize a gas turbine and bring back online a 50-year-old power plant that had been left for dead. The software can respond to the grid when it needs more power, simulate grid conditions, make the plant available and respond quickly in a profitable way.

Top image: GE is using data and software to design better machines. Engineers at GE Power in Greenville, South Carolina, placed some 5,000 measuring instruments and sensors on this 9HA gas turbine, and another 2,000 on a compressor validation rig that absorbs its 500,000 horsepower. The detectors produced nearly 5 terabytes of data, about half the content of the printed collection of the U.S. Library of Congress. “The test stand allows us to obtain information about the turbine about a year earlier than in the normal development cycle,” says engineering manager Brad Carey. Above: GE Power just unveiled the digital power plant for steam. It’s using neural networks and other AI tools to control power production. Images credit: GE Power

These are just three recent examples of how GE is using data, algorithms and the Industrial Internet to bring its own plants as well as those of its customers into the second machine age defined by digital technologies.

GE has invested more than $1 billion to develop Predix and launch a new business around it called GE Digital. Today, GE Digital CEO Bill Ruh is hosting investors at the unit’s Bay Area headquarters in San Ramon, California, to discuss the latest results and also GE’s digital roadmap for the future.

Ruh said that GE was “uniquely positioned” to digitize industry because its deep knowledge of big machines, which it has been making for more than a century – he call this GE’s domain expertise – and also because of Predix. “We have a powerful combination of advanced data science, physics and engineering,” he said. “This is the winning formula.”

Ruh says that GE is on target to bring in $6 billion in digital revenues this year and that the number could grow to $15 billion by 2020.

But he stressed that this is just the beginning. He said that that by 2020 the total market for industrial software and applications will be larger than the consumer internet, reaching $225 billion.

GE plans to capture a large share of that market by opening Predix to outside developers, which it did earlier this year. Now GE software engineers, partners such as Intel, customers and independent coders can start building their applications in the platform and offering them through the Predix marketplace. Pitney Bowes, for example, is building geospatial and location intelligence apps on Predix. “Location management is a fundamental enabler,” says Roger Pilc, executive vice president and chief innovation officer at Pitney Bowes. “I’m sure other companies will be writing apps leveraging these capabilities as well. This is the power of the Predix ecosystem.”

Ruh says 20,000 developers will be working on Predix by the end of 2016. You can see the presentation slides here. You can also watch the meeting live below.

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Virtual reality became domesticated last year — at least in America — when the VR viewer Google Cardboard arrived for the first time with the Sunday New York Times. Today, you could use it to explore Pluto’s frigid heart or climb to the top of 1 World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan.

As thrilling and immersive as these experiences are, they are just a playful precursor of what’s coming. Companies such as GE have started using VR to optimize the electric grid, service nuclear power plants and plan complex supply chains.

Top image: “We’ve been looking for ways to optimize our factories and VR seemed to us like a good idea,” says GE’s Neha Prajapat, an engineering tool specialist in Rugby. She’s also a gamer. Above: Prajapat and her team used Microsoft Kinect to study the movement of workers inside a GE factory. Images credit: GE

For example, for the past two years, GE engineers in Rugby in the U.K. have been using VR to optimize and even design factories, a task typically done with computers in two dimensions. As good as that approach is — virtually all modern factories have been designed this way — the method can make it difficult to anticipate problems that crop up once the building is in actual use in the three-dimensional world. But by then, it’s too late to fix the design without expensive retrofitting.

The GE team says VR, in combination with data coming from working factories, will help them avoid problems before they pop up. Real-world data allows the designers to see how workers move and where they gather in an existing plant and where production tends to back up. Design tweaks and more feedback then enable the team to improve new factory layouts. “We’ve been looking for ways to optimize our factories and VR seemed to us like a good idea,” says GE’s Neha Prajapat, an engineering tool specialist in Rugby who is leading the project.

Prajapat began working on factory-optimization projects in 2012 with the Manufacturing Informatics Centre led by Prof Ashutosh Tiwari at the nearby Cranfield University, a school that focuses on working with industry to develop new technologies. (Prajapat is pursuing a part-time Ph.D. there.)

Just like the New York Times, GE created VR tours of its gas turbine test stand in Greenville, South Carolina (above), and a locomotive testing facility in Pueblo, Colorado (below). Images credit: GE

Her GE team began working on VR as part of an Innovate UK funded project in 2014. They wanted to know if they could convert a standard 2-D factory model into a 3-D scale model and then tweak it for use in VR headsets or 3-D projection.

Prajapat plays video games, and so using the Microsoft Kinect gaming console to monitor movement in GE factories seemed to her like an obvious first step. The console can record objects’ positions and allows players to turn themselves into avatars inside games and perform tasks such as karate kicks and sword fighting.

The team decided to test the approach at a U.K.-based maintenance facility. They scouted 30 different locations at the plant and laser scanned them. “You could see people walking around the factory, where they were going, how long they were spending on operations, if people were crowding around one area,” Prajapat says.

So far, so good, but the following step — feeding the data into a 3-D model of the plant — was trickier. If the plant images were too high-definition, the computer would have trouble rendering them smoothly. The images shuttered and refreshed in a jerky manner. The researchers decided to strip some details from the digital record of the real world before they merged it the digital factory design.

The result is a visual experience that looks computer-generated but contains all the details of the real factory, including machines, doorways and signs. Managers can use the VR tour of the factory to analyze how shift changes work, as well as how people flow through the space, Prajapat says.

Prajapat says GE factory designers will soon be able to use information from the pilot to create plans for brand-new plants. “They will then be able to build factories that are as people-friendly and as flexible as possible,” she says.

Several projects already are underway using the technology for different GE businesses, including GE Grid Solutions, GE Aviation, and GE Oil and Gas.

The research team presented its mock-ups for the U.K.-based maintenance facility in January at the UK’s GE Energy Leadership Workshop, where it won the award for Best Showcase.

Says Prajapat: “I don’t think I’ve ever given out so many business cards at an event.”

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Swiss company Schindler Group may not be a household name, but the 142-year old company is one of the world’s biggest elevator, escalator and moving walkway companies. Its products haul millions of people every day, and soon it will also move gigabytes of data.

Schindler has just teamed up with GE Digital to connect some one million elevators, escalators and moving walkways to the Industrial Internet and use Predix, GE’s cloud-based software and analytics platform, to securely connect and analyze the data. “Schindler’s partnership with GE is a game changer,” says Schindler Group Chairman Alfred N. Schindler. “It will boost Schindler’s digitization strategy and reaffirm our innovation leadership.” 

Schindler is already gathering data from service calls and from sensors that keep track of how well its products are moving. The partnership with GE will help the company take digital monitoring to a higher level.

The data flowing from Schindler’s connected elevators and escalators will help the company identify, analyze and resolve possible service issues before they happen. That kind of predictive analysis helps reduce downtime, lower the chance you have to walk up a flight of stairs because an escalator or elevator is out of service, and even improve design.

GE has spent over $1 billion to develop Predix, the backbone for the Industrial Internet. GE estimates that the convergence of machines, data and analytics could contribute $10 to $15 trillion to the global GDP in efficiency gains over the next two decades. That’s about the current size of the U.S. economy.

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