PERSPECTIVE
WORLD-GENERATION NOV/DEC 2015
10
Wind farms that talk, self-aware loco-
motives, connected factories, digital oil
fields—once the stuff of dreams, the con-
nected machine has arrived. Just how far
will the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)
transcend business as usual? According to
industry leaders at GE’s Minds and
Machines 2015 conference, the IIoT is
poised to be a game-changing market dis-
ruption.
“This is the future—the Industrial
Internet, what it means for productivity for
industrial companies,” said Jeff Immelt,
Chairman and CEO of GE, “we really are
on the cusp of the next productivity revolu-
tion for our companies, and we’re proud to
be a part of it.” While the customer internet
has had decades to innovate and mature,
industry and utilities have been more con-
servative, incorporating connectivity in fits
and starts. With Predix, GE’s industrial dig-
ital platform, GE seeks to catapult industry
into the digital age, and soon, into the
cloud. “This power of science, this merger
of the digital and industrial world, is really
the genesis,” Immelt continued. “If you
went to bed tonight as an industrial compa-
ny, you’re going to wake up tomorrow
morning as a software analytics company.”
The IDC forecasts the Internet of
Things market to reach $1.7 trillion by
2020. Immelt predicted the Industrial
Internet will be worth double the value of
the consumer internet, “mainly because
people can see the productivity benefits.”
Further, GE’s presentation included impres-
sive predictions for the company and value
added to the economy:
By 2020, GE will be a $15 billion soft-
ware business, and Predix will enable the
industrial app economy reach $225 billion.
By 2030, digital companies will add $15
trillion to the global GDP.
WHAT’S POSSIBLE WITHTHE IIOT
Connectivity is changing how we do
business from the plant level to utility scale,
from the self-aware locomotive to a trans-
portation network of connected cities. The
Industrial Internet has the capacity to not
only disrupt individual industries, but entire
sectors, such as the energy sector. “Going
forward, the world needs more power,” said
Steve Bolze, President and CEO of GE
Power & Water. “50% more power is
required in the world in the next two
decades. We will spend as a combined
industry $10 trillion to put in that new
power and modernize the infrastructure
that exists today.”
There’s enormous opportunity—and
challenge—in connecting over 1 billion peo-
ple currently living without electricity in the
developing world, as Bolze noted. In com-
munities that lack utility infrastructure,
there’s opportunity to bypass the financial
and logistical headache of modernizing
infrastructure and “leapfrog” ahead to new
tech, such as connected microgrids and
advances in renewable energy. “The single
biggest opportunity for transformation is
digitization of the entire energy value
chain,” Bolze pointed out, which will reduce
cost and time to market, decarbonize the
industry, and help integrate renewables
into the grid.
Immelt offered three magic words to
convince industry to embrace the Industrial
Internet: “no unplanned downtime.”
Increased productivity and efficiency sav-
ings—this is the fuel that will fire up the
Industrial Internet. Machines connected
in real time to each other and the cloud
can generate predictive analytics to pre-
vent equipment failures. For the oil off-
shore customer, this could mean $5.2 mil-
lion in savings by preventing just one oil
platform failure; for a power generation
company, $1 million can be saved in just
one month by increasing efficiency,
according to GE’s presentation. Through
internal case studies, GE has spent years
proving its platform, Predix, can deliver
efficiency savings and greater productivity
for business.
GE LAUNCHES CUSTOMER-READY PREDIX
“Five years ago when we started, we
didn’t know what the hell this was,”
Immelt added, but now “our customers can
eat it, they can feel it…this is the
Industrial Internet.” Over the next 12
months, GE plans to establish Predix as an
industrial cloud with a focus on asset per-
formance management. GE announced the
launch of a customer-ready version of
Predix at Minds and Machines with
Exelon Generation and PSEG as early cus-
tomers. Exelon is rolling out Predix across
its three fuel classes, launching initially
with five projects with a focus on asset
optimization.
Companies can take advantage of GE’s
Digital Twin feature, which creates a digi-
tal version of an asset using physics mod-
els in the cloud. “This model gets richer
with every second of operational data,”
said Ganesh Bell, CDO of GE Power &
Water. Over time, the Digital Twin gets
better at predicting failure and improving
performance of the asset. Bell announced
the launch of the Digital Power Plant, a
combination of GE’s software defined gas
turbine, Predix, and a suite of applications,
enabling real time adjustments to market
conditions and predictive analytics on a
plant scale. In a recent press release, GE
estimated its Digital Power Plant technolo-
gy could save $230 million per new plant,
$50 million for an existing combined-cycle
gas powered plant, with an aggregate of
$75 billion in savings across the power
industry.
PREDIX,GE’S DIGITAL MANIFESTO
BY GILIAN CORRAL
(continued page 26)
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR,
WORLD-GEN
