"'But when?' you ask, and I say 'now.'" ABB's Peter Terwiesch described 25 current projects in the works that include the seamless integration of process automation and power automation systems.ABB has been developing technology in support of integration of renewables: inverters, generators and circuit breakers, as well as a system of e-mobility automobile chargers for electric vehicles. "Intermittency," Terwiesch noted, "is one of the main issues with wind and solar." You must have the ability to store energy and connect to a wider grid to damp out energy fluctuations from intermittent power sources. To that end, Terwiesch showed the SVC Light, a static VAR (volt-ampere-reactive) compensator with a storage component set up using lithium-ion batteries. The SVC Light can provide 5 MW to 50 MW from storage for 50 minutes to 60 minutes. This acts as a great buffer against intermittency, Terwiesch said.
The so-called "smart grid" is more than moving bits and bytes, he added. It is also about moving electrons. "We are going to see a widened grid," he said as he showed an animated slide adding islanding, voltage and load control, SVC and storage components, fault current limitation and demand-response. He described a real-world, very large-scale demo at the Stockholm Royal Seaport that includes smart homes and buildings, distributed energy systems, integrated use of electric vehicles, energy storage for network support, shore-to-ship solutions ("so the big cruise liners don't have to keep running their engines while in port," Terwiesch noted), smart primary substations and a smart grid laboratory, part of the larger Stockholm Royal Seaport Laboratory. "The Seaport's goal," according to Terwiesch, "is to be fossil-free by 2030." Terwiesch also described the Boulder, Colo., integration project done by ABB's new acquisition, Ventyx, that integrates alternate energy sources using four SVCs.
"If I could be visionary for a moment," Terwiesch said, "I would be looking for a DC overlay grid that would operate in addition to, rather than replacing the existing AC grid. But back in the here-and-now, motors and drives are the greatest energy efficiency opportunity we have." He described the new ACS2000 medium-voltage drive, which is transformerless to 6.9 KV. "Size reduction matters," he said, in describing the evolution of the ACS800 small-footprint drive to the ACS850 even-smaller-footprint drive.
ABB is unique, Terwiesch said, in being able to provide power electronics devices, assemblies and applications. This unified approach to protection and control is good for productivity, which logically brought him to the convergence of power controls and process controls in the System 800xA. He pointed out that this combined control system provides a plant-wide sequence-of-events (SOE) recorder for the very first time. Based on open standards, the combined system is an idea whose time has come, he said. "'But when?' you ask, and I say 'now.'" He listed 23 projects in a variety of industry verticals such as oil & gas, power gen, and mining and minerals—none, however, in North America.
Next, Terwiesch turned to new features in both software and products. He described a major new feature in 800xA v.5.1―node virtualization. This makes it possible to eliminate the proliferation of servers that used to be required in favor of a very small number of redundant servers. "It is easier to upgrade the servers this way, too," he said.
In terms of new products, he pointed to ABB's Optical Caliper―a non-contact thickness gauge for paper on a web machine, and the FieldKey WirelessHART adapter.
"BASF and NAMUR tested it and found it and WirelessHART to work quite well. But one thing we've learned is that most customers don't like the idea of having to change perhaps thousands of batteries every five years or so."
Terwiesch closed with some predictions for the future of wireless field devices. "We are entering the age of the autonomous field device," he said. "It will be powered by wind, solar, thermal gradient and power harvested from vibration. And we can do it now. In the show display area there is an autonomous temperature transmitter, WirelessHART-enabled, deriving its power from the thermal gradient from the thermowell. Go see it."