SOLUTION PROVIDER
CHAPTER 2
OPERATIONS
Analyzing Substation Asset Health
Information for Increased Reliability
And Return on Investment
www.UtilitiesProject.com/10819
A
sset Management, Substation
Automation, AMI and Intelligent
Grid Monitoring are common and
growing investments for most utilities
today. The foundation for effective execution of these initiatives is built upon the
ability to efficiently collect, store, analyze
and report information from the rapidly
growing number of smart devices and
business systems. Timely and automated
access to this information is now more
than ever helping drive the profitability
and success of utilities. Most utilities have
made significant investments in modern
substation equipment but fail to continuously analyze and interpret the real-time
health indicators of these assets. Con-
tinued investment in state-of-the-art
operational assets will yield little return
on investment unless the information can
be harvested and interpreted in a meaningful way.
DATA CAPTURE AND
PRESENTATION
InStep’s eDNA (Enterprise Distributed
Network Architecture) software is used
by many of the world’s leading utilities
to collect, store, display and report on
the operational and asset health-related
information produced by their intelligent
assets. eDNA is a highly scalable enterprise application specifically designed
for integrating data from SCADA, IEDs,
utility meters and other smart devices
with the corporate enterprise. This provides centralized access to the real-time,
historical and asset health related data
that most applications throughout a utility
depend upon for managing reliability and
profitability.
A real-time historian is needed for
collection, organization and reporting
of the substation asset measurement
data. Today, asset health monitoring
is often not present or it is comprised
of fixed alarm limits defined within the
device or historian. Additionally, fixed
end-of-life calculations are used for
determining an asset’s health. It is a
daunting task to identify and maintain
fixed limits and calculations that
can be variable based on the
actual device characteristics,
operating history, ambient conditions and device settings. As
a result, the historian alone does
not provide for a complete asset
monitoring strategy.
ADVANCED ANALYTICS
InStep’s PRiSM software is a selflearning analytic application for
monitoring the real-time health of
critical assets in support of Condition Based Maintenance (CBM).
PRiSM uses artificial intelligence
and sophisticated data-mining
techniques to determine when a
piece of equipment is performing poorly or is likely to fail. The
early identification of equipment problems leads to reduced
maintenance costs and increased
availability, reliability, production
quality and capacity.
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CASE STUDY
Southern California Edison
On a typical day Southern California Edison (SCE), one of the largest utilities in the United
States, provides power to more than 13 million people across 430 cities and communities.
Reliable delivery of this power requires the continuous monitoring of their large geographical territory. Since 1993, InStep’s eDNA historian technology has been widely used throughout SCE to provide near real-time series data capture, archiving and analysis. eDNA collects data from SCE’s Energy Management Systems (EMS) and substation assets and then
distributes this information to the operations, planning, power engineers, maintenance and
other personnel that rely on this data for effective decision making. Operational personnel
might use the information for comparing the current power load to that of a historical like
day, while maintenance engineers could use the information to determine why a particular
area is experiencing an outage.
The software learns from an asset’s individual operating history and develops a
series of operational profiles for each piece
of equipment. These operational profiles
are compared to an equipment’s real-time
data to identify and predict failures before
they occur. Alarms and Email notification are
used to alert personnel of pending problems.
PRiSM includes an advanced analysis application for identifying why an asset is not performing as expected.
TECHNOLOGY ADVANCEMENT
Utilities are rapidly replacing legacy devices
and systems with modern technologies. These
new systems are typically better instrumented
to provide utilities with the information necessary to more effectively operate and better
maintain their assets. The status of a breaker
can be good information for determining
the path of power flow but does not provide
enough information to determine the health
of the device or when it is likely to fail. Modern
IEDs and utility meters support tens to hundreds of data points in a single device. This
data is quite valuable and necessary in supporting a modern utility asset management
program. Many common utility applications
such as maintenance management, outage
management, meter data management,
capacity planning and other advanced
analytical systems can be best leveraged
when accurate high-resolution historical
data is readily available. An intelligent
condition monitoring analytical layer is
needed for effective monitoring of such a
large population of devices and sensors.
CONCLUSION
The need for efficient and effective data
management is rapidly growing as utilities
continue to update their assets and business
systems. This is further driving the need for
a highly scalable enterprise historian. The
historian is expanding beyond the traditional
role of supporting operations and is becoming a key application for effective asset management and overall business success. The
historian alone does not provide for a robust
real-time asset health monitoring strategy,
but when combined with an advanced online
condition monitoring application such as
InStep’s PRiSM technology, significant savings and increased reliability can be achieved.
InStep continues to play a key and growing
role in supporting many of the most successful utilities in their operational, reliability and
asset monitoring efforts. ■
InStep Software is leading supplier
of real-time performance management
software that many utilities use for
efficiently collecting, analyzing,
displaying and reporting information
from their intelligent devices
and business systems. InStep’s
products include eDNA, a real-time
enterprise data historian, and PRiSM,
an advanced online asset-health
monitoring solution.
Contact Information
John Kalanik
President
Anthony Maurer
Vice President Technology
James Chappell
Vice President Operations
InStep Software, LLC
55 E. Monroe St., Suite 2710
Chicago, IL 60603
Phone 312.894.7837
www.instepsoftware.com
BUSINESS CONTACT
Sean Gregerson
Director of Sales and Marketing
Phone 312.894.7859
[email protected]
>>>>
WEBLINK
More information and additional
material can be found online at
www.UtilitiesProject.com/10819
utilities.com
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