Establishing a operations center room for operational monitoring in Sweden
Connected and manned around the clock to ensure safe and reliable energy delivery to customers – that is the goal of Adven’s new operations center. Through constant operational monitoring and remote control, the company hopes to be able to prevent disruptions and, in the long term, optimize production for almost 50 plants.
In modern premises in Örebro, Sweden, Adven has established an advanced operator’s room for operational monitoring of the company’s various production facilities around Sweden. With centralized remote control and monitoring, Adven hopes to eventually take the step into tomorrow’s way of managing more than 50 of the company’s sites at the same time.
“We always want to ensure a safe and reliable delivery to our customers, regardless of the time of day. By having the operators in the central operations center supplement existing staff on site, regardless of whether they are on duty or on standby, we will be able to streamline and ensure this even more,” says Lincoln Engberg, acting head of the operations center.
The project for the central operations center was initiated in the autumn of 2022 and in the spring of 2024, the first facility is expected to be monitored from Örebro. Once the largest of Adven’s industrial and district heating plants are connected, the plan is to gradually optimize production and work to prevent disturbances.
“For every plant that is connected and managed, solid preparatory work is required from our process operators to learn the local plant. This requires a well-developed collaboration with the local operators, where developed standards and processes ensure and clarify expectation levels and the desired outcome,” says Lincoln Engberg.
The new IT structure of the centralized operations center, as well as the newly developed and integrated control systems that connect everything, also create new opportunities in the future.
“As all our operations’ real-time data ends up in the same place, we can develop new methods and tools, perhaps in combination with AI, to see things we may not be able to see so easily today,” concludes Lincoln Engberg.
Adven has decades of experience in operational monitoring and remote control. In Finland, a central operations center has managed over 100 energy plants since the early 1980s, and in Estonia a similar operations center was established four years ago.