The digital future of substations: 5 benefits of predictive maintenance
October 2024
With the assistance of Gomero's monitoring equipment SIPP, over 6,300 oil spills were averted at substations last year. Recent drainage statistics reveal that SIPP prevents oil spills in approximately every 20th drainage. The statistics encompass data from Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany, Italy, and Australia.
Gomero's SIPP is a unique solution enabling more efficient and predictive maintenance of substations in the power grid. SIPP ensures, among other things, continuous monitoring of oil bunds designed to prevent transformer oil leakage into the environment in case of a potential failure, checking for oil content, water level, and temperature. Concurrently, the bunds are automatically emptied of rainwater, with SIPP ensuring that the drained rainwater is free of oil contamination. Presently, around five percent of maintenance drainages need to be terminated due to excessively high oil content.
In 2023, there were numerous instances illustrating how extreme weather conditions present new challenges to our power grids, both in Sweden and abroad. In Sweden, heavy rainfall not only brought dreary summer weather but also offered a glimpse into a future where critical infrastructure, such as the power grid, needs adaptation to new, extreme weather conditions. The necessity to sustain operations under all weather conditions poses significant challenges for power grid companies.
To ensure the reliability and operation of power grids, companies traditionally rely on scheduled inspections and reactive maintenance measures. This often means that technicians, regardless of weather conditions, must go out into the field solely to manually check selected functions.
– Monitoring and automatic drainage of rainwater become particularly crucial during heavy precipitation. Simultaneously, this is only part of what needs to be done to ensure the safety and sustainability of our power grids. Regardless of the weather, power grid companies need to think innovatively and invest in technology capable of anticipating, preventing, and automating significant portions of maintenance work. A critical aspect of the solution is connecting critical components at substations for the collection and analysis of real-time data, creating a better decision basis and thus more efficient maintenance work, comments Jan-Eric Nilsson.
With Gomero's SIPP Hub, entirely new opportunities arise to connect more sensors and leverage Gomero's established and secure infrastructure to collect and analyze more data from various equipment at the substation. SIPP Hub enables customers to continue the transition to predictive maintenance by connecting more equipment at the substation. This allows for the reduction or, in some cases, complete elimination of time-consuming and sometimes risky fieldwork.
An example of how SIPP Hub is used is the measurement and monitoring of SF6 gas at one of Ellevio's substations in Värmland. By connecting more sensors to SIPP Hub, the solution can be applied in virtually any area where data can provide network owners with an immediate picture of maintenance needs and other factors that can affect operational reliability.
– Previously, physical visits were necessary to collect this information. It is demanding and entails that it can take months between data collection, analysis, and action. With the help of SIPP Hub, we can now receive current measurement values continuously, providing better conditions to detect microleakage of SF6 gas, which we know has a negative environmental impact, comments Mattias Airiman, Analyses and Strategy Manager, Network Operation, Ellevio.