Like other utilities, power systems are vulnerable to failure through the usual wear and tear or expiry of parts. Historically, many organisations have relied on preventive maintenance to sustain the efficiency of electric utilities. However, a more efficient way is used in modern management, and that’s through predictive maintenance.
Predictive maintenance employs special software powered by algorithms, machine learning technology, and artificial intelligence to predict when your asset might be due for servicing or maintenance. If you want to explore an important application of predictive maintenance, click here for electric utility asset management.
Some of the parameters taken into account in predictive maintenance are previous failure rate, asset age, and prevailing conditions, among other factors. In summary, predictive maintenance assesses components known to fail at particular times over the years.
For more explanation, here are the reasons why predictive maintenance is critical to your electric utility management processes:
Helps Improve Customer Satisfaction
Earning the trust and loyalty of customers and ensuring their satisfaction are of paramount importance in any business. To increase customer satisfaction, you need to employ good strategies for managing asset risks, avoiding unplanned outages, and working on the maintenance of critical assets. In addition, you should inform your customers when there’s an expected outage to help them plan their utility use accordingly. However, this isn’t always possible, especially when there’s an unexpected equipment failure.
Now, this is where predictive maintenance comes into play. You can include predictive intelligence capabilities in your systems to help you control and avoid asset failures, penalties, and outages. As a result, you can plan and prioritise asset maintenance works, then let your customers know in advance.
Lowers Maintenance Costs
One of the unique advantages of predictive systems is that they give precise predictions of outcomes, failures, and events. With such an elaborate and accurate system, you can avoid fatal and unforeseen failure costs such as lost revenue, intangible costs, disposal of destroyed utility assets, collateral damage expenses, and regulatory fines.
With a system in place, you can save a substantial amount from unexpected asset maintenance. In addition, you also lower your fixed costs significantly.
Optimises Field Force
Maintenance of field asset utilities requires good planning and execution of processes. With proactive maintenance and remote asset management, you can monitor the effectiveness of your field assets at pre-determined intervals.
As a result, you eliminate reassignment of your workforce from a particular area to go and restore an unexpected outage. Such incidents might disorient and hinder already planned maintenance activities.
Facilitates Effective Data Management
In electric utility assets, you deal with vast and complex data. The good news is that electric utility systems come with predictive analytics capabilities. The system effectively manages data collected through supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA). SCADA systems are essential for monitoring and controlling electric, telecommunication, and water and waste control equipment.
In addition, predictive systems can be used to analyse data collected through the meter data management (MDM) software. This data is helpful in the control of intelligent metering systems.
Moreover, you need predictive systems to manage data collected by remote monitoring systems. Such data include duplicate data, conflicts of timestamp data, and several systems data conflicts that might lead to faulty analysis.
Helps Improve Safety
Data collected from different utilities is essential when it comes to safety. It would help if you had a proper integration of data from sources like SCADA, customer information system (CIS), enterprise asset management (EAM), gas-insulated switchgear (GIS), weather channels, and other online systems.
This data can be analysed using predictive asset analytics systems to help you deal with any safety risks. Once you’ve identified possible threats, you can take appropriate measures to mitigate them.
Improves Asset Lifespan
Usually, assets which aren’t maintained well are susceptible to quick wear and tear. It then leads to a short lifespan of your assets. To avoid the unnecessary replacement of your utility assets, you have to leverage predictive maintenance. It helps you save a lot of money in the long run.
Retains Institutional Knowledge
A well-maintained predictive system can serve you for several decades. Furthermore, the data stored helps achieve repeatable maintenance processes. When your experienced employees retire, the insights they’ve collected remain behind and are passed on to new staff. This information becomes your institutional knowledge base.
Final Thoughts
When dealing with electric utility assets, predictive maintenance is essential. It’s more efficient than preventive maintenance in sustaining the efficiency of electric utilities. With the compelling reasons cited above, you might want to adopt predictive maintenance for your electric utility asset management.
