OSIsoft LLC
Operational Intelligence Transformed with the PI System

The energy industry has been growing at an unprecedented pace in tandem with challenges and business opportunities alike. A major impediment that exists in this landscape is the dearth of power systems personnel with the skills and training to deal with the aging electric power infrastructure and the increasing amount of intermittent renewable power and electric vehicle charging systems. “For example, most States will not be able to meet their Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) requirements without proven solutions to handling intermittency on the grid,” informs Chuck Wells, Industry Principal at OSIsoft. Adding to the list of crises is Obama’s recent executive order regarding Federal leadership in sustainability and greenhouse gas emission reductions, which adds to the complexity of keeping the power grid stable and cost effective. With Phasor Management Units (PMUs) spewing large amounts of data every second (2400 samples per second), data archiving becomes an issue. Addressing these multi-faceted challenges, OSIsoft is continuing to improve the speed and scale-ability of its core products to cope with large increases in the number of measurements and the rate of data acquisition. This ensures that the remaining technical staff of the Utilities can address their issues. OSIsoft—headquartered in San Leandro, CA—enables businesses to capture and leverage sensor-based data across the enterprise to improve efficiency, asset health, productivity, sustainability, quality, safety, and security within their operations.

“OSIsoft facilitates enterprises across a range of activities like exploration, extraction, production, generation, process and discrete manufacturing to leverage streaming data to optimize and enrich their business ecosystems,” says Wells. The company introduced a series of pre-packaged solutions that are being used directly by the Utility companies and system integrators. These include patented methods to handle high volume synchronized data calculations in real time. The resulting information can then be used to improve the security and stability of the grid as well as grid components such as transformers, lines, breakers, and power conditioning equipment.The company’s pre-packaged time synchronization templates can be used directly by utility companies as well as system integrators. These include patented methods to handle high volume synchronized data calculations in real-time.

OSIsoft facilitates enterprises across a range of activities like exploration, extraction, production, generation, process and discrete manufacturing to leverage streaming data to optimize and enrich their business ecosystems

The PI System software, OSIsoft’s enterprise data infrastructure solution, is an industry standard used by over 65 percent of the Fortune 500 industrial companies for data collection, historizing, finding, analyzing, delivering, and visualizing data from process, control, and automation systems within industrial operations. The PI System is an enterprise system for real-time decision-making and advanced business analytics. A standard PI System can be configured into a Cyber Secure Synchrophasor Platform (CSSP) used in microgrids, designed to regulate frequency and voltage, operating autonomously and helping mitigate grid fluctuations to reinforce grid resilience.

OSIsoft has sustained a number of clients by providing leading edge solutions. A case in point would be the Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC)—a regional entity responsible for compliance monitoring and enforcement—that used OSIsoft’s PI System in their $108 million Department of Energy (DOE) project. WECC developed a naming convention using standard PI System software tools to handle all phasor data collected from WECC members and organized it in a simplified manner. This provided a system that allowed any authorized WECC member to retrieve and analyze past data in the PI System.

“OSIsoft will continue providing innovative data collection, analysis, and visualization software enabling our clients to increase their profits by sharing data across the organization and easily interfacing real time data to other business management software,” says Wells on a closing note.