Demonstrate compliance. Remove bottlenecks and inefficiencies, minimize risk, maximize reliability and bring operating costs down to compete on a global scale.

Electric T&D companies are facing tougher regulations from the DOE and NERC at the federal level and tougher state regulations from the PUCs. The costs for non-compliance are high; including lost production revenue; increased legal, labor and IT costs to remedy charges and disputes, and of course fines that can be levied in the tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars to suit the consequence severity of non-compliance.

The Smart Grid Movement

The “smart grid” movement is upon us, but smart metering and AMI success cannot be realized without an intelligent backbone to support more reliable energy delivery. Intelligent Utilities are the backbone of a smart grid, and these enormous changes are the foundation to the economic security of North America.  A low carbon footprint cannot and will not be possible in a few short years. Regardless of energy source, excess variability of operational and service reliability is not an option. 

This is where Ivara EXP can help. 

Substation T&D utilities are implementing EXP to strengthen NERC compliance and PUC compliance and enable “Intelligent Assets” and “Intelligent Process Management” to improve service reliability and grid backbone performance while lowering operating & maintenance costs.  Ivara EXP features  include:

•  Asset health index calculations and health scoring to support asset management and “repair verses replace” decisions
• Condition based maintenance (CBM) applications where asset performance indicators are used to trigger and close notifications and WOs within SAP, IBM Maximo or another EAM / CMMS.
• Analytics used to continuously improve asset management strategies (e.g. performance comparisons on equipment, work order history analysis, failure history analysis, standard task and job plan analysis, PM frequency and rationalization reviews, Pareto analysis, Monte Carlo simulations with Weibull analysis reporting, life cycle cost analysis,  root cause analysis, etc.). Ivara is an authorized Isograph business partner.

Typical Ivara EXP Implementations in T&D

Ivara electric T&D customers typically begin implementation of the EXP system at substations and later rollout to pole and line equipment.  In addition to the features described above, here are some examples of Ivara’s Substation/T&D specific solution to enhance grid reliability, reduce O&M costs and strengthen NERC compliance via the following core functional capabilities of EXP technology:

• Ability to collect data from both online monitoring systems such as OSI PI and DCS or SCADA systems along with data collected from PdM analyzers and manually collected data from inspection routes and station reads, in order to perform combined calculations to more accurately and efficiently analyze and score asset health by asset class for decisions on lifecycle replacement verses repair or overhaul, and ability to drill down to individual equipment health to determine the most appropriate maintenance task by an electrician, maintenance technician or engineer.
• CMMS / EAM integration (SAP, IBM Maximo, Cascade, etc.): When receiving preventive and corrective indicator alarms and work triggers from EXP, the integrated system generates the appropriate notification or work order in the CMMS.  This applies to several work processes ranging from straightforward inspections to complex oil and breaker analysis.
• Ability for maintenance group to inspect and test equipment using Ivara’s Mobile Tablet PC interface (Ivara Remote) with leading indicators of asset performance and calculations on multiple data sources to determine serviceability and health integrity; as well as document findings and take any immediate course of action required to prevent potential failure.  These decisions require multiple sets of performance parameters, data points to be collected for analysis, complex algorithms, and tolerances at the individual Asset Type level; all supplied by Ivara’s CBM solution (EXP) and integrated with EAM / CMMS and your geographic information system (GIS).  Here is a list of station inspection activities controlled and integrated between the tablet PC user in the field and the communications interface with both Ivara EXP and your CMMS:
  • Substation employee checks assets as prescribed in the substation manual
  • Use substation readings report to record information taken during instrument reads – add all other comments in the “Remarks” section. Station reads include capture and real-time analysis/action on the following:
  • Transformer bottom-oil temperatures
  • Tap changer temperature differential readings
  • Tap changer operations through neutral
  • Oil filter discharge pressure
  • Circuit-breaker mechanism condition
  • Sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) circuit-breaker gas pressure to alarm point
  • Ambient temperature
  • Load readings (current and maximum values)
  • Use substation condition assessment checklist to report on the conditions of the substation facility and equipment
  • Use the spill prevention, containment and countermeasures inspections to document that proper environmental conditions are met
  • Use the circuit breaker operations report to document all circuit breaker counter operations and document the triggering event for a counter change
• Ability for electricians and maintenance personnel to inspect and test equipment using Ivara’s Tablet PC functionality (Ivara Remote) that is used independent of Ivara EXP Enterprise in a disconnected environment.  You are able to leverage the Ivara Remote application as a simplified version of the EXP desktop application, relevant for use in a remote location. You may require users to go to remote locations for extended periods of time (e.g. hours, days, weeks), while having direct access to the information required for tasks needed “in the field.”  In order to support a disconnected environment, each remote computer has its own separate database.  The remote databases are periodically synchronized with the Ivara master database via a synchronization server.
• Ability to configure EXP software with four different indicator types to account for a variety of indications of performance within your substation, transmission and distribution asset hierarchy: numeric indicators, rule-based indicators, descriptive indicators and calculated indicators.
• Replace existing oil diagnostic analysis applications (e.g. TOA: Transformer Oil Analyst, by Delta-X Research) and DGA applications such as Doble with Ivara EXP to enable a unified system and more efficient and accurate process.  The integrated oil diagnostic test using the EXP system includes the following electronic process:
  • Substation employee goes into the field to test oil for a particular asset using the EXP Tablet PC interface with indicators of asset condition
  • Oil test samples go to lab for analysis
  • Electronic reports are produced for responsible supervisor and solicitor
  • Report copies are forwarded to the appropriate asset/reliability manager
  • Manager manually adjusts maintenance plans as directed by the e-reports
  • Lab results are then sent in batches to the appropriate resource
  • Lab resource validates and imports lab results data into EXP repository
• Consolidate data collected from existing applications such as OSI PI data historian, Doble DGA data and other electronic data collection methods as well as manual inspection data into one data repository where the data inputs are combined into one calculation to determine remedial action in advance of downtime or quality issue.
• Provide analysis and optimization through a system-supported KPI dashboard and reporting system with automation of methods such as Weibull Analysis, Apollo Root Cause Analysis (RCA), and life cycle costing (LCC) – all tied to a continuous improvement loop to update asset management strategy / approach.
•  Ability to monitor equipment health and produce health indices for major classes of equipment used to develop long term material condition for investment plans on capital replacement and expansions.  Ability to create risk and probability scoring models that can be used to develop a capital replacement plan.  Scheduling algorithms can be applied to automatically calculate health scores.
• Provide historical, current, and predictable information from disparate systems that will enable the organization to significantly reduce operating costs and improve asset reliability – identify the critical modes of degradation (or trending toward an out-of-range condition), nature and consequence of failure, and time remaining until failure.
• Determine overall health of a system as well as a single complex asset, with a clear understanding of asset functionality, condition ratings of different asset components and subsystems that can be combined to create an effective health score for the asset, and the range of asset scores can be further subdivided into ranges of scores that represent varying degrees of asset health.
• Reliability program implementation and real-time monitoring: ability to prioritize asset classes and assets according to a criticality ranking by failure probability and consequence criteria chosen such as safety, environmental, availability, throughput, quality, cost, compliance, etc.  Ability to use criticality ranking results to assign the most appropriate asset performance management strategy such as reliability centered maintenance (RCM), maintenance task analysis (MTA) or current practice review (CPR).  Ability to link indicators of equipment performance to the asset strategy to determine the appropriate maintenance task or job plan (works orders and outage tasks) in a continuous improvement loop.

To get more information on Ivara’s solution for Electric T & D, call Ivara at 1-877-746-3787 today.