Reliability Needs of Today’s Utilities
The goal of UDC’s Reliability Analysis solution is to address the need of today’s utilities for increased ability to monitor and visualize electric assets and their performance to support reliable operational performance and maintenance. This solution is focused on giving operational personnel specific analytic network tools they can use to assist in their daily reliability engineering and asset management jobs of operating and maintaining the electric system.
Fully Leverage Your Systems for Better Results
While our Reliability Analysis solution has several components, a key component is our Digital Utility leveraged software that provides a GIS-based jumpstart application called Feeder Sentinel that can be configured to fit the operational needs at your utility.
This solution brings together GIS visualization capabilities, dynamic analytic network technology and your operational systems to display the information already found in your operational systems such as Outage, Scada/Historian, DMS, Asset Management Systems in direct relation to your electric assets.
For example, Feeder Sentinel can provide a summary of asset types by manufacturer as well as allow the reliability engineer to drill down on a specific asset and see all historical outages, cause codes, inspections, maintenance work and, looking into the future, the device’s predicted failure based on its digital footprint.
Enhanced Analysis Capabilities
Capabilities of this configurable solution for supporting reliability engineering can include:
Outage Trend Analysis
- Investigate causes of outages for the purpose of remediation
- See exactly where to install animal guards, strengthen poles, trim trees, replace UG conductors, or even add vehicle barricades
- Study quantity and locations of momentary outages – see where to look for transient issues (MAIFI)
- Investigate outage frequency issues to drive your CAPEX spends on Distribution Automation (DA) schemes
Power Quality Issue Analysis
- Study locations of power quality issues along feeder sections – look for causes such as:
- voltage regulators not working or chasing their tails
- capacitor banks not working
- poorly connected DERs – poor power factor locations along a feeder
- Validate protection and control schemes are behaving as intended
Customer Reliability Analysis
- See which customers have been out the most and those that have been out the longest to help reduce SAIDI and SAIFI
- Compare outage indices between municipalities
Feeder Reliability Analysis
- Easily see how each feeder’s performance is affecting your outage indices – drive CAPEX spends on where to install DA devices and target UG conductor replacement
- Determine problem feeders based on outage history or overloaded capacity issues – overloads may need conductor replacements
- Look for feeders exhibiting odd loads based on actual trends or forecasted utilization
- Determine which manufacturers are supplying poorest performing equipment based on clear confirmed results