World’s leading industrial goods manufacturer, General Electric, is eyeing investment opportunities in Pakistan’s energy sector. GE is paving its way in the nation’s power sector by striking an agreement with the Hub Power Company (Hubco), Pakistan’s largest independent power producer. According to the deal, the international giant will provide digital solutions for Hubco’s power plant in Baluchistan currently producing 1,292 megawatt (MW) of electricity.

The current capacity of the national power producer is immense, making huge contribution to the nation’s power production as it is the largest independent steam power plant in the country.

Digital solutions…reliability and reduced downtime

GE’s relationship with Pakistan’s dates back 50 years as it has been providing equipment and services to the energy sector for decades and this project is its 6th deployment of digital solutions. Once the digital solutions are functional, Hubco’s power plant reliability will be strengthened by ensuring consistency.

GE’s has backed these solutions with its most reliable cloud operating system, Predix specially designed for industrial purpose. These software solutions will enable Hubco to ensure constant monitoring and analysis of its operations in real time I.e. Without any lag across every touch point. Mostly, power plants suffer downtime which creates an energy void on the supply side but this system will enhance plant’s efficiency and reduce its downtime significantly. This will also enable Hubco to preempt any major hurdle in its production and plan a defensive strategy particularly related to plant maintenance.

The world is tapping mounting opportunities in digitization and according to the industry gurus, there is a value creation of roughly USD 1.4 trillion. This is applicable for companies that are early adopters of digitization between now and 2025 and another investment of USD 90 billion is expected in energy digitization by 2020.

These figures provide a very encouraging future for GE as well as for Pakistan’s energy sector since both can capitalize on their long standing relationship and reap the fruits of digitization. Hubco on the other hand is also planning some coal power projects in Thar and anticipating an rate of return of appropriately 20% thus offering some good news for its share holders in terms of value creation.