Improved Grid Reliability & Resilience
Until now, local utilities have had to rely on historical data to inform maintenance priorities and actions. With Grid Analytics’ ability to provide accurate insights into pre-failure components combined with network segment criticality, this changes everything, allowing a more informed evidence-based prioritisation effort.
The result is a more sustainable network that delivers reliability and resilience for utilities and their customers.
Improved Worker Safety
Current visual inspections require workers to climb, or be elevated, to allow visual inspection of each tower. The ability to conduct inspection by exception and daytime resolution of identified issues pre-failure, minimises the need for high risk inspection or maintenance actions.
Improved Optimisation of Operational Resources and Costs
Network maintenance needs are often constrained by budgets and staffing levels, with visual inspection schedules often limited to 30% or even 20% of the network annually. The Grid Analytics solution enables inspection and/or maintenance by exception, allowing optimisation of limited resources, whilst improving metrics for reliability and service levels.
Improved Asset Management & Quality Assurance
Asset management is a continually evolving practice, with industry standards helping to inform methodologies used by mature infrastructure owners/operators. Current mechanisms for measuring asset life use manufacturers and field obtained data (visual inspections). New industry standards such as ISO-55000 encourage the use of condition data as an input into strategic asset management tools.
Repair efforts and new infrastructure builds can also benefit from a Grid Analytics evaluation. This can support the review of repair actions to ensure that the component has been properly repaired. In implementing new electricity infrastructure, the ability to review the build can provide a QA/QC (quality assurance/quality control) function.
A good example of this occurred when a subcontractor just completed the build of a Transmission Network segment for a utility, but the segment upon commissioning was attributed to intermittent outages. A review revealed 10 components in the segment were emitting RF signals - an extremely high number for such a short segment. Upon further detailed evaluation, the problem was determined to be inadequate torque levels for a clamping mechanism. The work process documentation was updated and upon a follow-up review, determined that the repair actions were done correctly and no partial discharge-based RF emissions were detected, eliminating the intermittent outages.
Sustainability Ready
The use of renewable energy generation mechanisms is increasing by both primary power generators and consumers, and demand profiles are evolving due to the change in where this takes place, subsequently increasing pressure on the electricity grid.
Having a more resilient grid will support the injection of energy from sustainable sources and accommodate the changing demand profiles.
Bushfire Risk Mitigation
The root cause of most pole fires is the breakdown of insulating properties of overhead equipment and the resultant current leakage. Unfortunately, this current leakage is usually invisible and void of a heat signature – making it almost impossible to detect using standard visual and IR inspections.
Learn more about the applied benefits of our technology in our case study.