The last thing a power company wants to see is a power outage. Equipment failure means higher maintenance and replacement costs, as well as unhappy customer complaints and reduced revenue. If a 500MW generator fails, the power company could lose $1.26 million within seven days.
Electric utilities are turning to next-generation devices, such as smart grid sensors, to drive change. By combining sensor data with powerful analytics, power companies can use insightful smart grid solutions to prevent outages and increase profits.
What drives smart grids?
The power industry is struggling to keep aging assets running. While demand for electricity is increasing, the number of trained maintenance professionals is decreasing. While most power companies are not subject to the pressures of market competition, they still face pressure to operate frugally. The more efficiently a utility operates, the more it benefits.
The current status quo is costly, inadequate, and potentially dangerous
The power industry has a wide variety of critical assets, including generators, generator circuit breakers (GCBs), disconnect switches, step-up transformers, isolated and non-isolated bus ducts, voltage transformer cabinets, medium voltage switchgear and motors. These systems can be subject to excessive loads, normal wear and tear, and challenging environmental conditions, resulting in thermal or electrical failure. If not monitored, electrical systems can overheat, stop working, or even cause a fire.
Electric utilities often rely on employees to perform manual equipment inspections. At best, manual inspections can only be done periodically. In the worst-case scenario, power companies need to shut down their systems to perform these checks. Inspectors can see obvious problems such as physical damage, worn connectors, signs of insulation degradation, moisture and component overheating, but their view is often incomplete and errors and omissions can occur.
Sometimes power companies will thermally image equipment to see what’s going on. However, this requires trained technicians and specialized equipment, making inspections expensive and time-consuming.
Power companies have thousands of assets to monitor and maintain, so they prioritize high-voltage environments. However, if a power outage occurs in a low-voltage environment, they may need to spend a lot of time and cost to find out the cause of the power outage.
Small but powerful smart grid sensors could protect power companies
To support smart grids, power companies can use smart grid sensors to track temperature, leakage, security and equipment wear to monitor critical assets at scale.
Small sensors that can get stuck in hard-to-reach areas and have small surface areas can collect measurements without human intervention. Additionally, they are easy to install and require no maintenance or annual calibration.
Sensor data for decision-making
Once smart grid sensors collect and aggregate temperature and other data, they can bring it into the digital space, making it fully visible. Analytics systems turn data into insights to help operators make informed decisions.
For example, smart grid operators receive automatic alerts when sensors detect temperature changes in critical assets, and they can then react quickly to reassess or replace overheating assets before any damage is caused.
With simple, scalable sensors, power companies can use their data as part of daily operations and achieve a faster return on investment.
