Software enhances operational performance of transformers
This technology accommodates the complexity of grid operations to safeguard energy reliability and resilience while reducing capital investment and expense.
Source: ABB
ABB’s Power Grids business has launched its APM Edge solution for transformers.
This technology accommodates the growing complexity of grid operations to safeguard energy reliability and resilience while reducing capital investment and operational expense.
The new software solution for asset owners helps to enhance the operational performance of power transformers and lowers the total cost of ownership.
Based on ABB’s APM technology, which currently monitors 1.3 million assets in production around the globe on a continual basis, APM Edge delivers unique, real-time data to power producers and users on the current and future operational health of their transformer assets. This offers actionable intelligence to inform capital investment and maintenance strategies while reducing production downtime. These prognostic capabilities, for example, enable customers to more accurately forecast when a critical asset like a transformer is likely to fail and model alternative planning pathways.
As the grid evolves to integrate both greater amounts of variable renewable energy and increasingly popular customer-facing technologies, such as battery energy storage and electric vehicles, critical grid infrastructure components such as power transformers must accommodate shifting energy load patterns and dispatch in a more flexible and responsive manner. These shifts will only grow more acute as global energy demand rises and grid supply and demand dynamics increase in complexity, and as more existing transformer fleets are reaching their designed life expectancy and have inadequate historical operational performance records to efficiently extend their remaining operational life.
Through a deeper knowledge and understanding of their assets, APM Edge allows asset owners to expand transformer availability with lower maintenance costs, transition to condition-based maintenance strategies and better prioritize their capital investments. APM Edge includes condition-based prognostic horizons and risk profiles alongside simulation tools that extend an operator’s monitoring and diagnostic capabilities into the future – from the fleet level all the way to individual transformer assets.
Source: T&D World