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. automation technologies that enable utility and industry customers to improve their performance while lowering environmental impact." Its primary competitors include the other big industrials with large electric portfolios, namely Alstom, Eaton, General Electric, Schneider and Siemens.
In this article, I'll cover:
· ABB's worldview
· Its 2013 themes in its four key areas
· Its strengths
· Its challenges
I hope you will weigh in below with your comments and with your vote in our Quick Poll.
The ABB worldview
Smart Grid News regularly publishes strategic overviews of key vendors to help utilities decide which companies will make good partners. Does the vendor see things as you do? Does its roadmap for the future match up with where you want to go? A glance at ABB's worldview may help you make up your mind.
As you'll see in the nearby illustration, ABB believes a utility's operational effectiveness is based on three pillars – information technology (IT), operations technology (OT) and communications. In the last three years, ABB has made both external acquisitions and internal initiatives to buttress its strength in all three.
Using those three building blocks, ABB is focused on four broad areas:
1. Transmission grid management
2. Distribution grid management
3. Distributed energy resources
4. Utility analytics
ABB is focusing its smart grid efforts in four broad areas .
Although all of the Big Six have broad, impressive portfolios, ABB may have the best balance. At least if you agree with me that value is relentlessly migrating towards software, where ABB's Ventyx subsidiary gives it a strong leg up. Like most of its competitors, ABB is weakest in communications. Its Tropos subsidiary now gives it wide-area capability, but ABB does not have a full line to compete with the likes of Cisco and Silver Spring Networks. Given the specialized and rigorous requirements of communications and network management, I think ABB may be wise to work with partners for many of its communications-centric solutions.
From products to solutions
Far too often, big companies end up as a collection of isolated fiefdoms and therefore fail to capture all the potential synergies. (General Electric has long suffered from this problem, for instance, as has Siemens.) ABB's solution to this classic conundrum is to change its focus from products to solutions. In the past few years, ABB has gotten much better at "integrating across businesses to offer solution sets," according to Andy Bane, Executive Vice President for Strategy at ABB subsidiary Ventyx.
Transmission grid management
Some companies use the smart grid moniker to refer to medium- and low-voltage equipment. At ABB, the high-voltage side is very much part of the smart grid vision. It continues to see growth in its FACTS 9flexible AC transmission solutions business. It recently developed a breakthrough high-voltage direct current (HVDC) circuit breaker. It also has a new, $100 million factory in North Carolina for high-voltage transmission cables.
Distribution grid management
As are most of its competitors, ABB is strengthening its distribution management system (DMS). In the fall of 2012, I explained how Alstom Grid is busily moving transmission-level capabilities down to distribution-level systems. ABB sees things differently, according to Gary Rackliffe, ABB's Vice President for Smart Grids North America. "We're not moving transmission capabilities downstream," he told me. "We already have a rich solution set." ABB now has a common platform for outage management, fault detection/isolation/restoration and volt-VAR optimization. Rackliffe says ABB's next focus will be to layer in additional applications.
Outage management will be a major theme for 2013. More precisely, "life-cycle outage management" as Rackliffe calls it. ABB wants to go well beyond just the restoration assistance offering by a plain-vanilla outage management system (OMS). It wants to help with the full gamut of issues -- advance planning as storms approach, simulations of different approaches, "playbacks" to look for better strategies, and training to improve worker performance.
Asset health and asset management will be another important thrust. ABB is after the full gamut of asset assistance -- alarms that alert to problems; optimized maintenance based on actual condition rather than published estimates; and lifecycle decision support to help utilities decide with precision when and whether to repair, refurbish or replace.
Marrying expertise from different divisions sounds great in theory, but it can be difficult in practice. We'll have to wait to see if ABB can institutionalize widespread collaboration between different lines of business. It will have a chance to make good on that promise thanks to a contract with American Electric Power (AEP) to build an "asset health center."
Distributed energy resources
ABB includes a wide range of assets under the DER banner, including demand response, distributed generation, storage, electric vehicles and microgrids.
When it comes to distributed energy resources, one ABB goal is the ability to create virtual power plants. The company believes it is possible to marry demand response with volt/VAR optimization to create a powerful system for managing peak demand. Along with competitor Alstom Grid, ABB has the ability to add the "market view" for those utilities that interface with PJM and similar markets.
On the energy storage front, ABB is working on a "turnkey" project for Duke Energy. Its storage portfolio now ranges from community-scale storage all the way to transmission scale. And on the electric vehicle front, ABB has an investment in ECOtality, which provides EV charging infrastructure.
Like many other big companies, ABB is now starting to see growing interest in microgrids. It recently acquired Australia-based PowerCorp, which specializes in microgrids and renewables integration.
Utility analytics
Most people put utility analytics into two piles. One flavor gives insights about customers and their energy usage. The other gives insight into the performance of the grid.
ABB is focused on the latter. It will rely on its FocalPoint analytics suite, now housed in its Ventyx subsidiary. In some ways, FocalPoint resembles General Electric's new Grid IQ Insightboffering, but with a big head start (it is already in use by more than 70 utilities). FocalPoint is a packaged solution with dashboards that display key performance indicators (KPIs). ABB claims that it already has a library of more than 3,000 different KPIs, with more in the works. Executives can see interactive financial trends, top tier customer impact, problems and remedies. Operators can view interactive maps, schematics, weather conditions, crew locations and much more.
Page 2: ABB strengths and challenges >>
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