THE local branch of Mitsubishi Power Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd. aims to introduce power plants powered by “intelligent” digital solutions, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, to ramp up performance and reduce carbon emissions, a company official said.
“Mitsubishi Power Philippines is focusing on transitioning power plants to fully automated facilities with enhanced efficiency and performance,” Shunsuke Nishimura, general manager of Mitsubishi Power’s Philippine branch, told BusinessWorld in a recent e-mail interview.
“Our focus is on developing digital power plants that will increasingly be able to take autonomous action to optimize performance and reduce emissions as well as adjust to changing environmental conditions, the grid and energy markets,” he said through a public relations agency.
Mitsubishi Power has a suite of intelligent digital solutions called TOMONI, which uses advanced analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning to make power plants “smarter.”
“TOMONI helps our customers make more efficient use of their assets, improve efficiency and enhance power plant performance. It can also enable fuel flexibility which in turn can promote decarbonization of power generation systems,” Mr. Nishimura said.
He said using TOMONI technology for monitoring and forecasting can provide savings of over $4 million per year.
“These benefits come from digital solutions that eliminate trips or failed starts and digital analytics that can provide early warning of issues that could cause trips and runbacks,” he said.
The Philippines currently houses one of the Tokyo-based company’s monitoring centers in Alabang, Muntinlupa.
“The center tracks performance data to provide improvements to plants through early fault detection, optimized outage management as well as data collection and forecasting analysis. It utilizes TOMONI to collect and analyze this data to generate actionable insights for customers,” Mr. Nishimura said.
The Philippine branch of Mitsubishi Power has served 15 plants across the country’s three major island groups. These plants account for 27% of the country’s energy requirements.
In February, Mitsubishi Power committed to install a 29-megawatt binary cycle power system called Organic Rankine Cycle at the Lopez-led Energy Development Corp.’s Palayan geothermal power plant together with Turboden S.p.A., a group company of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. — Angelica Y. Yang