Remote Services for Power Generation Equipment

This paper describes the advantages of remote services for the power industry with particular focus on power transformers. Remote services significantly improve plant operation and maintenance activities by providing continuous condition monitoring to avoid downtime and improve performance. Power assets can be continuously monitored, as well as plant units or an entire fleet. All relevant information is made available across different assets by means of a remote access platform. Further development of distributed generation (renewable power) and new loads (e.g. electric cars) add significant challenges on to the electric grid and, in particular, to power transformers. In addition, a large amount of local energy producers change the flow of energy going through the distribution network leading to load peaks (both predictable and unexpected) that drive new needs for improved transformer cooling and thermal management. In order to extend asset life time, secure a high reliability and avoid unplanned outage, associated with possible penalties, power plant owners and utilities give a high priority to controlling and monitoring their transformers. Moreover, there is also an increased trend towards more advanced technologies to monitor for example the core, windings, oil, tap changer and bushings of the transformer. Traditionally, data collected from the monitoring devices have been treated manually. Given the increasing amount of data, this will no longer be feasible. Remote monitoring and automated assistance is crucial to transform the data stream into useful actionable information that can be presented through customized dashboards on a fleet as well as equipment level. Last but not least, remote services also provide significant benefits by connecting the best (or most familiar) service engineers to the customer quickly and determine the necessary actions efficiently.