Preventative Maintenance for Utilities

Electric utilities are among the most asset-intensive industries and one of the most critically essential, where failure can mean catastrophe. Maintaining those assets has, therefore, always been a priority. Failure of most assets could mean outages or reductions of power, and failure of certain critical assets could have a domino effect, causing failure of assets down the line. Any failure could result in loss of revenue and regulatory censure; massive failure could mean extremely costly replacement costs. The goal of any maintenance system is the prevention of both total failure as well as any deterioration of performance.

Typically, preventative maintenance is designed to help assure that an asset will not reach failure or serious performance deterioration. Preventative maintenance uses real world data from the equipment to determine when and what to perform maintenance on. It applies algorithms to that data to find trends in key indicators, such as temperature, vibration, electrical, pressure, and other measurements that can indicate when a failure is likely to happen.

Much of the data used in these calculations is collected in real time with infrared technology and wireless or wired condition monitoring sensors while the equipment is running. This helps create a more accurate and comprehensive picture of both individual assets and the health of the operation.