Scrubgrass Generating is an 85 mw fluid bed power plant that reclaims mine sites by cleanly burning abandoned coal piles around Pennsylvania and returning a stable limestone and ash product to the mine site as beneficial use fill. When their power purchase agreement (PPA) ended in 2013, Scrubgrass began a new operating mode as a PJM merchant power generator and began selling power in open market. The dynamic nature of merchant pricing made it imperative that the plant have real time knowledge of both power price and their production cost to ensure that they did not operate at a loss without knowing it (something that never happened in the PPA). In order to calculate real time production costs, the plant needed a single platform that could integrate process data with data from many external sources and perform real time calculations. The plant was able to leverage their existing PI system to include data streams from finance and web based pricing sources to create a single process/cost database. The newly unified PI database gave the plant engineering and owners unprecedented access to 23 years of existing process data, allowed them to integrate it with financial data, and condense it all into easily visualized equations that described plant costs across the load range. With the support of big data and the new characteristic curves engineering was able to accurately forecast that the plant would run in a different mode than previously expected and could reduce annual maintenance spend $1mm - $2mm more than financial models predicted. This turned the project from a forecast annual loss to marginal gain which gave ownership a high enough confidence level to continue operating the plant instead of mothballing or decommissioning the operation.