The power and water industries are changing faster than ever, and the automation that runs them has to keep pace. In an Ovation Users’ Group Conference keynote built around the theme “Agents of Change,” Rick Kephart, Vice President of Technology for Emerson’s Power and Water Solutions business, walked through how the Ovation Automation Platform is evolving across operations, hardware, and intelligence to meet that pace.

Why It Matters

The assets showing up on the grid today, including battery storage, industrial loads, data centers, and microgrids, barely existed in this space a few years ago, when the conversation was mostly about boilers, steam turbines, gas turbines, and nuclear power. Control speeds that once felt fast at 20 milliseconds are now moving toward the millisecond range. Rick framed the challenge around two forces, rising complexity and the people component, with the people side ranking first. The platform’s job is to add flexibility and intelligence, so a human operator stays effective as the landscape shifts.

Key Takeaways

• Feature Pack 1 is now available and adds a Copilot button that launches the in-context experience inside the engineering tools.
• A new Ovation Grid Edge Controller, arriving early next year, targets loop times down to 1 millisecond using Precision Time Protocol.
• Coming soon, the Ovation Web HMI brings a web-based, HTML5 operator experience into Ovation Green Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA).
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) always keeps a human in the loop, with the Ovation Intelligence Framework doing the real work behind the model.
• The roadmap starts with five agents, with 20 more behind them, plus an Agent Builder so customers can build their own.

What Is New in Feature Pack 1

The recently released Feature Pack 1 includes fundamental changes, consolidated patches, and new features. It adds a Copilot button across the engineering tools that launches the virtual advisor in the right context, much like how Microsoft Copilot works. It also expands remote node support on the OCR3000 so it matches the earlier OCR1100, and adds a new controller driver that lets Ovation take a synchrophaser input, essentially a high-speed electrical sensor for voltage, current, and frequency, and use it directly as input and output. These feature packs are typically released annually.

Flexible Hardware for Faster Control

The Ovation Grid Edge Controller, a variant of the OMC100 due early next year, syncs to the nearest microsecond using Precision Time Protocol rather than the millisecond precision of Network Time Protocol (NTP). It carries eight software-defined channels, redundant current transformers and potential transformers, and can serve as a digital fault recorder.

Cybersecurity and the Operator Experience

Everything now starts and ends with cybersecurity, Rick noted. Emerson continues to build relationships with the United States National Labs and security vendors, and has transitioned its cybersecurity suite from VMware to Hyper-V. On the operator side, the new Ovation Web HMI puts HTML5 graphics, point information, and the signal diagram into Ovation Green SCADA in September, with alarms and trends following over the next year.

Adding Intelligence, With a Human in the Loop

The Ovation platform does not write directly to an output; a human stays in the loop, and the aim is to make that person more effective. The model itself, whether Llama or another, is the least important piece. The real work happens in the Ovation Intelligence Framework. Using a smartphone as an analogy, Rick explained that it serves as a platform that integrates data sources and hosts applications called agents. Ovation 4.0’s rearchitected plumbing lets models reach system data safely through agents, and Emerson already has several third-party agents.

To see how these capabilities come together, explore the Ovation Automation Platform on Emerson.com.