Substation Reliability Tip #05

Best Practices for Asset Reliability

Whether you manage a single unit or an entire fleet of transformers, the goal is to ensure operations run as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible—for as long as possible. However, the host of activities, tasks, and responsibilities related to managing and maintaining electrical power assets can be daunting. Where do you start, and which pieces of equipment get prioritized over the others? If a failure occurs, where will it cause the most disturbance, damage, and downtime?

Understanding these risks and ensuring best practices are in place to prevent and predict failures is vital. We all know it is much more cost-effective to prevent a breakdown than fix a repair. Transformer owners should understand the actual cost of an outage in the electrical system and which equipment is mission-critical to the organization’s operations. The actual cost of a failure is not limited to the price of the asset alone. The biggest hit to the bottom line is the downtime cost while waiting for the replacement to be installed.

At SDMyers, we aim to help organizations employ best practices to maximize the life of electrical system assets. This starts with understanding equipment criticality and condition and then evaluating the risk of electric power system failure to develop a reliability program.