Dive Brief:
- The New York Power Authority announced Monday it would implement a critical asset performance management (APM) initiative to monitor its more than 1,400 miles of transmission lines.
- The software, developed by GE Power, tracks the overall health of transmission assets and can help the utility avoid unnecessary maintenance or proactively replace equipment that is likely to fail.
- The information will feed into NYPA's Integrated Smart Operations Center (iSOC), where the utility is testing a new monitoring and diagnostic approach that utilizes data from up and down the electric supply chain.
Dive Insight:
NYPA uses the same software on its generation assets, and so far has saved up to $3 million in emergent maintenance costs, demonstrating another way utilities can leverage technology to generate savings.
NYPA wants to be the first digital utility and has been working with GE to collect and monitor as much data as possible from its 16 power plants and across 1,400 miles of transmission. By utilizing the "digital twin" of an asset, and comparing those ideal numbers to actual operating data, NYPA can predict and avoid equipment failures — and avoid scheduled maintenance on equipment that is functioning.
Eventually, aggregated data and predictive analytics from generation and transmission assets will be combined into a unified APM solution, NYPA said.
Rich Gaines, director of iSOC, told Utility Dive earlier this year that NYPA runs more than 400 applications, constantly generating and analyzing 24,000 data points from sensors that monitor every step of the production and transmission of electricity. And the center is doing that in real time, "so that you're not relying on a monthly look-back report. You can intervene and make course corrections in real time," he said.
Gaines also said he expects the data-driven approach to equipment monitoring will become standard. "There will be different platforms out there, but I think a lot of utilities will start to look at this concept," he said.
