Saudi Electricity Company?s (SEC) Energy Efficiency Center in Dammam is world?s first comprehensive and integrated centre for monitoring, managing and operating generation plants
The centre combines all the operations of managing all stages of power generation in one centre instead of several centres. This way, SEC is enabled to raise the efficiency of management and operation of its generation plants.
Khalid Al-Tuaimi, executive V-P for generation at SEC, said, ?The establishment of the centre is part of the strategic transformation plan adopted by the company since 2014, aiming to be on equal footing with the world?s leading companies in the field of electric power.
?The digital transformation of project management and operation is one of the most important priorities and challenges that SEC pursues to achieve that leadership. In this context, that centre was established to enable the company to manage and operate all of its power plants from one place.?
He pointed out that the centre aims to implement a number of technical operations at a high level by taking advantage of the operational data of the stations to maintain the company?s assets and managing them with efficiency and high reliability, raising the generation processes to the global level of leadership, and to achieve the optimal utilisation of energy resources of all kinds ? crude fuel, diesel and gas.
?The establishment of this centre will enable SEC to achieve a number of strategic objectives. The most important of these is to have the first unified knowledge centre to collect operating data for generation stations and analyse them, monitor the performance and optimal use of fuel as well as reduce the operational costs of stations, early detection of potential faults generating units. It can also provide technical support to stations around the clock. It will also allow the company to manage plant assets more efficiently,? Al-Tuaimi noted.
The centre?s activities focus on three main processes ? business operations, asset management and operations improvement. There are also 13 sub-processes provided by the centre according to the business line. The commercial operations include managing the fuel bills of the generation stations, controlling the power sales of the stations and monitoring the consumption of fuel against the energy demand. With regard to asset management operations, the centre is concerned with monitoring performance indicators, low thermal efficiency, monitoring the asset life cycle of each station and preparing periodic reports on the performance, operation and maintenance of each station.
Regarding operations improvement, the centre provides six activities that focus on improving operational efficiency, improving maintenance strategy and good management, monitoring emissions at each station, managing their fuel operations, monitoring the performance of units, maintenance schedules and emergency breakdowns with high efficiency. It also provides instantaneous and technical support to all generators and their employees and can provide immediate advice during emergency repairs and maintenance.
SEC is also about to complete the establishment of another similar centre in Jeddah with the same efficiency that of Dammam?s. The two centres will operate in parallel and backup each other.
