Thermal plants once queued for retirement are now being asked to run harder, longer, and far more flexibly than their designers intended. In a Power Magazine webinar, two Emerson power experts walked through how control, measurement, and digital upgrades extend the life of those assets while new generating capacity remains years out.

Why It Matters

North American infrastructure was not built for the load growth now arriving from data centers, and the top industrial turbine manufacturers are booked solid for the next two to five years. That leaves operators one practical option: get more out of the plants they already own, many of them past the 40-year mark.

At the same time, decades of operating knowledge is walking out the door as experienced staff retire, opening both a knowledge gap and a reliability gap. Modernization closes both with capital already committed to existing assets.

Key Takeaways

• Extending existing thermal assets is the fastest response to load growth, because new turbine capacity is largely spoken for.
• Ovation 4.0 adds a generative artificial intelligence (AI) enabled architecture, software-defined control and input/output (IO), and a web-based graphics package.
• AI agents run on a model hosted inside the plant network, and a human always decides what action to take.
• Advanced power applications typically return their investment in one to two years, often in less than one.
• Better field measurement is what makes advanced control work, starting with guided wave radar and drift-detecting temperature transmitters.

Why Aging Thermal Assets Became Strategic Again

Seth Harris, formerly the Growth Director for Power at Emerson and now the Global Marketing Director for the power industry, noted that the shift toward electrification has been visible for a decade, but the last 18 to 24 months brought an acceleration few anticipated. Growth driven by AI and data centers now requires every available asset to contribute. On the capital side, he was blunt: there is no third pocket of money, so the capital already in the ground must work harder.

Lauren Wherry, formerly the Manager for Thermal Power Solutions Engineering and now the Director of Modernization Sales, described the operating reality behind that demand. Assets nearing the end of their planned life tend to be neglected: upgrades stop, maintenance is deferred, performance declines, and the unit gets slated for retirement as uneconomic.

Generative AI, Lauren said, can capture institutional knowledge from operations and maintenance manuals, procedures, workflows, and piping and instrumentation diagrams, then make it accessible to new engineers. AI-driven predictive maintenance can cut maintenance costs by up to 30 percent and raise availability by up to 20 percent through advanced anomaly detection.

What Ovation 4.0 Changes in the Control Room

The Ovation Automation Platform is purpose-built for power and water. After five decades, it spans far more than a traditional distributed control system (DCS) or supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system. It includes cybersecurity, digital twin simulation, and a power plant simulator, and it scales from a single application up to fleet-wide control. Emerson supports roughly 1,800 gigawatts of generating capacity globally, about half of North American capacity, with more than 2,000 engineers dedicated to power.

Ovation 4.0, released about seven months before the webinar, is what Lauren called the on-ramp to the future. It introduces a generative AI-enabled software architecture, software-defined control and I/O, a compact controller with 32 embedded, software-configurable channels, virtual controllers that reduce hardware cost, and a web-based graphics package with a drag-and-drop widget library.

The gives operators an always-on conversational interface preloaded with Ovation documentation, and sites can add their own procedures to a secure local server. Programmable agents cover four areas: operations agents watching processes and alarms, maintenance agents tracking asset health and forecasting parts, instrumentation and control agents catching sensor drift, and management agents rolling the rest into dashboards.

The large language model stays inside the plant boundary, reaches no external data sources, and runs under domain-specific guardrails. It recommends; the operator decides.

Three Applications Where Modernization Pays Back Fastest

Remote operations let a smaller group of operators supervise more units from one location, issuing set points, starting and stopping units, and distributing load across thermal and renewable assets in one energy management strategy. Local operators stay on site for equipment issues and upsets. Paired with procedural integration, startups that once took dozens of clicks now take a handful.

Advanced drum level control addresses the challenge of monitoring water height during transient events and forces operators to take the loop to manual during startups, a leading cause of runbacks—at one Kentucky site that had been seeing a runback on every startup, drum level optimization and procedural integration brought that down to one runback over a full year.

Steam temperature optimization uses model predictive control (MPC) to manage long and nonlinear spray water behavior. One case showed a 0.3 percent heat rate improvement worth more than $228,000 annually at $2 per MMBtu. Less overspray also means less wear on attemperators, valves, and piping.

The Measurement Layer Underneath It All

Advanced control performs only as well as the data feeding it. For drum level, customers pair the Ovation application with

Emerson’s portfolio spans measurement from Rosemount, Micro Motion, and Flexim, final control from Fisher, Bettis, and ASCO, and the Ovation platform above them, which lets device-level diagnostics travel up to the enterprise and grid layers. The same architecture extends to greenfield builds, including data center energy management, where availability requirements are strict and power, cooling, and control must operate as one integrated backbone rather than isolated components.

Take the Next Step

To better understand how to drive project and ongoing operational success, watch the webinar and visit the Data Centers section on Emerson.com.