Emerson's Subsidiary Helps Power Plants Upgrade Their Systems for Increased Efficiency and Less Interim Downtime

PITTSBURGH (April 9, 2001) -- With reliable power a major concern in California and a growing number of other states, power plants are under pressure to modernize their operations for greater efficiency and output, while at the same time minimizing their generation downtime. Thanks to newly developed "automated migration tools" from Westinghouse Process Control, Inc., a subsidiary of Emerson (NYSE: EMR), power plants can now modernize their process control systems without the lengthy outage period usually necessary for a technology upgrade.

Westinghouse demonstrated the capability of its "automated migration tools" this past January by enabling a natural gas-fired cogeneration plant owned by Tractabel Power in eastern Los Angeles County to both upgrade its process control system and remain a reliable power supplier for its California customers.

Tractabel Power's San Gabriel facility began a planned outage at 7 a.m., Saturday, Jan. 13 to upgrade from its older Westinghouse WDPF system to a state-of-the-art Ovation Information & Control System, also from Westinghouse. Thanks to Westinghouse's automated migration tools, the San Gabriel control system upgrade was completed in less than 12 hours. The facility was generating at full capacity by Sunday and was able to fulfill a request for power it received from Southern California Edison that afternoon.

The automated migration tools developed and applied by Westinghouse allow users of its older WDPF systems to migrate to the groundbreaking Ovation System with minimal re-engineering and system re-tuning. The Ovation system provides enhanced system functionality and process efficiency while reducing risks related to components becoming obsolete. The automated tools convert WDPF graphics and logic codes to Ovation's advanced open architecture in a reduced period of time, helping customers minimize costs associated with generation downtime during a planned outage.

"The benefits a power plant can realize from modernization - including lower maintenance and materials costs, improvements in heat rate, and reductions in unit startup time - are often overlooked for fear of long outage periods during the upgrade," said Ann Pauley, president, Westinghouse Process Control. "Our new automated tools take some of the fear out of modernizing and allow our customers to retain much of the investment they made in their current hardware, engineering, and tuning."

As in a traditional WDPF-to-Ovation migration without help from the automated tools, customers are able to retain WDPF I/O, cabling and cabinets. Customers have the option of later moving to the Ovation I/O, which is designed for fast, easy installation.

Westinghouse began to develop its automated tools to speed up the technology migration process more than a year ago as part of a project for the Bay County Resource Recovery Facility, a small waste-to-energy power generation plant in Panama City, Fla. The plant needed to upgrade its control system to meet federal Clean Air Act regulations and offered to field-test the migration tools technology for Westinghouse. By March 2000, Westinghouse engineers had the tools fully developed. Last April, Bay County was able to complete its entire upgrade in less than 60 hours.

With the help of Westinghouse engineers, Midland Cogeneration Venture in Midland, Mich., migrated its 1,500-megawatt plant to the Ovation open technology platform last October in just two days, with minimal re-engineering. Midland's upgrade outage began on a Saturday and by Monday - two days later - the plant was generating power again. By Tuesday, Midland was operating at full capacity, supplying up to 11 percent of the power used on Michigan's Lower Peninsula.

Westinghouse Process Control, Inc., is a global supplier of advanced distributed process control and information systems. The Pittsburgh-based company is a recognized leader in developing plant-wide process control solutions for the power generation, water treatment and wastewater treatment industries. Westinghouse Process Control is part of Emerson's Fisher-Rosemount family of companies. Information on the company, its Ovation system, and migration options is available at www.westinghousepc.com.

St. Louis-based Emerson www.gotoemerson.com is a global leader in bringing technology and engineering together to provide innovative solutions to customers in process control; industrial automation; electronics and telecommunications; heating, ventilating and air conditioning; and appliance and tools. Sales in fiscal 2000 were $15.5 billion.