Is your aging grid equipped to meet tomorrow’s energy demands today?
Asset Management
System Operations
Capital and Strategic Planning
Human Resources
Asset Management
Enable condition-based maintenance (CBM) and predictive maintenance (PdM) strategies for the Asset Management team
Asset Management teams throughout this industry are being challenged to do more with less:
- More assets in the fleet to manage and maintain
- Less money in the budget to repair and refurbish
- More stringent standards and expectations for reliability
- Less staff to get all that work done. Those remaining are
less-experienced and less qualified than ever before.
For transmission and distribution enterprises,
this will require automating as much data collection and analysis as possible,
allowing your scarce engineering expertise to focus on high-risk assets and
implementing risk mitigation strategies.
Substation Health Advisor is a comprehensive CBM and PdM
solution for critical substation assets, including:
- Transformers
- Circuit breakers
- Batteries
- and more
Substation Health Advisor diagnoses emerging asset
reliability problems using international standards and industry
best-practices to reduce risk of unplanned and forced outages with
predictive fault detection capabilities.
System Operations
Monitor asset performance and health condition during peak loading with
real-time early-event detection for the System Operations team
Demand for power is growing faster than the delivery capacity
of the power grid. Decades of under-investment in the T & D sector
have eroded the excess capacity designed into the grid in the 60’s and 70’s.
For transmission and distribution enterprises, this means the existing
delivery network will be pushed to deliver more and more power. Systems
Operations teams will need to understand exactly how much more they can
push their grid assets, while maintaining the safety margins needed to
prevent accelerated aging.
Substation Health Advisor provides real-time alerts when
critical assets reach operational thresholds causing accelerated
aging and increasing risk.
- Transformers running too hot will age at an accelerated rate— reducing
their effective life span and increasing the risk of sudden failure
- Circuit breakers with low gas pressure may not operate properly
when needed —increasing the risk that over-current protection will fail when needed
Substation Health Advisor diagnoses emerging asset
reliability problems using international standards and industry
best-practices to reduce risk of unplanned and forced outages
with predictive fault detection capabilities.
Capital and Strategic Planning
Provide consistent and transparent asset health index
information for the Capital and Strategic Planning teams
A typical large electric utility will have a sizeable budget for asset management.
But only 10-15% of that is dedicated to work management — the day-to-day maintenance
and repair activities necessary to keep the lights on.
Often, up to 90% of the asset management budget is dedicated towards capital
expenditures — purchasing and installing new equipment to meet your organization's
sustainment and growth needs.
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Regulated utilities are required by their governing Utility Commission
to validate the health of their asset base and justify investments in growth
and sustainment capital before they can secure approval to increase customer
rates.
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For non-regulated utilities, making sure that limited capital
dollars are being invested wisely in a way that reduces business
risks is just good, bottom-line business practices.
Substation Health Advisor provides reliable, trusted and transparent
condition assessments of all your T & D assets fleet-wide.
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Understand the distribution in equipment health
for each asset class, now and projected.
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Understand the risks of equipment failure and forced
outages through your strategic planning timeframes.
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Extend the installed life expectancy of critical capital-intensive assets,
increasing ROI and ROCE significantly.
Substation Health Advisor provides confidence
that capital expenditures are being invested strategically
to sustain your existing asset base, and reduce risks throughout your grid.
Human Resources
Capture expert knowledge and company expertise for the Human Resources team.
The aging workforce has hit the Utilities sector particularly hard,
with few new employees entering this industry. In North America,
the average age of the utility workforce is about 50 years,
and NERC estimates 40% of Power industry staff will be eligible
for retirement by 2009. NERC has identified the aging workforce
as one of the key issues challenging the reliability of the North America power grid today.
- Operators, technicians, engineers, maintenance crews will be retiring in unprecedented numbers in the coming years.
- Expert knowledge on how to assess and maintain these critical assets is being lost.
- Invaluable knowledge and expertise is retiring out the door faster that it can be
replaced through post-secondary education and industry training.
Substation Health Advisor captures this invaluable expertise and embeds
it into best-practices diagnostics and analytics. Engineers and technicians who continue
to work can leverage that codified knowledge, enabling them to monitor more assets with less effort.
Substation Health Advisor retrieves and analyzes the necessary data,
informing key stakeholders when a problem is detected, and automatically raises a
corrective maintenance work order in the organization’s computerized maintenance
management systems (CMMS). This integrated solution gives technical staff the
capability to focus on high-risk assets, and implement fleet-wide risk mitigation programs.