Intelligence at Work: The Gap Between the Control Room and the Quarterly Report

Intelligence at Work is a six-part series exploring how GE Vernova embeds decades of operational expertise into key decision workflows, evolving our software from a system of record into a system of intelligence.

The information presented is intended to highlight capabilities available today and provide an outline of general product direction and it should not be relied on in making a purchasing decision. The information on the roadmap is for information purposes only and may not be incorporated into any contract and is not a commitment, promise, or legal obligation to deliver any material, code, or functionality. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for our products remains at our sole discretion.

At first, it's just a number that doesn't quite fit. The finance team flags it in the monthly review. Fuel cost per megawatt-hour is up 2.3%. No rate increase from the supplier. No change in dispatch profile. Just more money going out the door for the same output. Operations shrugs. Everything looks normal from their side. No alarms. No trips. Asset monitoring scores in APM Health are within range. The units are running. Finance asks again next month. Now it's 2.7%. Still no explanation. Still no alarm. Still attributed to “load factor," or "seasonal variation," or "we'll look into it."

A couple of months later, an inlet guide vane (IGV) inspection reveals vanes that have been drifting out of calibration since before the cost spike started. The fuel waste was real. The emissions increase was real. Money left the building every single day, but nobody connected the dots.

Operations & Maintenance sit in the control room. They watch asset monitoring scores in APM Health, performance indices, and work orders. Their language is availability, reliability, heat rate. Finance sits at the corporate level. They see fuel cost per megawatt, carbon intensity per unit, and quarterly variance. Their language is margin, cost per tonne, regulatory exposure. Sustainability lives in this room too, tracking Scope 1 emissions reports and audit trails.

The same physical event, an IGV drifting out of calibration, creates a cost spike in one system and an asset health trend in another. Nobody connects them because nobody is looking at both simultaneously. Each team is answering their own question correctly, with incomplete information. The gap between those languages delays root-cause understanding and costs real money every day it persists.

The financial case is reason enough. Less fuel wasted means money saved. But, it also means less carbon emitted. You don't need to lead with sustainability for this to be a sustainability story. Fix the economics and the emissions follow.

Optimization in power generation has always been a moving target. Ambient conditions shift hourly. Fuel properties vary by delivery. Equipment degrades continuously between planned outages. The setpoint that was optimal at 6 AM is not optimal at noon, and it definitely is not optimal a few months into a combustion inspection interval.

Every degree of drift costs money. A turbine running slightly rich overnight is not dramatic enough to trigger an alarm. A single night is a rounding error. A year of them across a fleet is a line item.

Unplanned maintenance is an industry-wide problem, borne out in the numbers. According to McKinsey's 2023 analysis of asset productivity in the energy sector, 62% of power and industrial companies reported above-inflation increases in maintenance costs, even as most adopted modern approaches for tracking workforce utilization. For energy and materials companies, outages typically consume between a third and half of the overall maintenance budget and can reduce annual production volume by 5 to 10%. Plant Engineering's maintenance cost benchmarking confirms that breakdown and emergency work costs three to five times more than the same repair performed as planned maintenance. A 2026 World Economic Forum analysis found that approximately 25 to 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions are waste emissions, the byproduct of badly maintained, defective, or outdated equipment and infrastructure.

Failures demand attention. Drift just sits there, costing you money without ever sounding an alarm. The cost accumulates invisibly until someone finally asks why the fuel bill is wrong.

An IGV drifts out of calibration. No alarm fires. But the airflow mismatch shifts the combustor off its tuned operating point, and three things happen simultaneously:

One root cause: A financial hit, a compliance risk, and an operational signal. Three teams with zero shared visibility.

Same scenario. APM Health and CERius carbon emissions management software running in parallel, both watching the same IGV. APM Health flags the asset at the subcomponent level. IGV stroke rate is trending away from baseline. Command versus actual error percentage is widening. Fuel flow differential is growing. Operations knows which component is drifting and can plan the intervention before it becomes a trip.

CERius’ digital twins identify an emissions anomaly and flag it as a deviation. The cost of the drift is quantified in tonnes in terms of emissions. No manual calculation required. Finance gets a root cause, not a shrug. Sustainability gets audit-ready documentation grounded in operational data, not assumptions.

Both teams see the same event, however the maintenance decision now includes the carbon cost of deferring. The quarterly report traces the emissions deviation to a specific asset and a specific timeline. And the CFO stops asking, "Why is fuel cost up?" because the answer is already assembled.

The shift is from "What happened last quarter?" to "What is happening right now, what is it costing us, and what do we do about it?"

Now, zoom out from that example to what else CERius monitoring can do in a power plant.

CERius provides predictive emissions monitoring (PEMS) that can replace expensive continuous emissions monitoring system (CEMS) hardware, using the turbine's existing operational data to model emissions at 30-60% cost savings versus traditional physical monitoring systems. It catches CEMS drift that would otherwise underreport actual emissions and understate the financial exposure. Approximately 50% savings on sustainability consulting and emissions reporting follow from automated collection and audit-ready reporting across Scope 1, 2, and 3.

The audit problem disappears. No more three-week reconstruction exercises where Operations digs through sensor logs to explain 75 events to corporate. The trail builds itself, every cycle.

CERius adds full visibility of emissions profiles alongside the operational data they already have. Across Power, Oil and Gas, and Metals and Mining, the cost of not knowing is no longer invisible.

The automated data link between combustion performance and emissions accounting is strengthening. Predictive emissions monitoring is expanding to additional fleet configurations. The vision is that condition monitoring, emissions intelligence, and cost visibility stop being three separate conversations and become a single thread from operational decision to carbon ledger to financial impact. Closing the gap between the control room and the quarterly report.

Today, CERius covers emissions and cost impact at the site and corporate level, providing a fuller picture that no single team could assemble alone.

Fix the operational drift. Reduce the fuel cost. Lower the emissions. Satisfy the regulator. It was always the same action. The difference now is that everyone can see it at the same time.

Coming up, what happens when predictive analytics stops telling you something is wrong and starts telling you exactly what to do about it.