Case Study
Powering Up with Automatic Control
Electricity is an everyday necessity and while power generation is a $400 Billion industry in the US alone the availability of electricity is regularly taken for granted by consumers. Interestingly, power companies are often forced to err on the side of suboptimal control in order to assure availability of the electricity they generate. One common challenge for operations staff is the 100s of PID controllers that regulate a typical plant’s steam generation processes. Operating PID control loops too close to their constraints can result in trips that bring down a plant. With a disruption of service and fines of $40K - $60K for each trip the incentives for configuring PIDs for “loose” control can be meaningful. Unfortunately for many the configuration and tunin