Digitalization of renewable resources, the path to a more reliable electrical network
Electricity has become a vital part of everyday life and is required for almost everything we do, and transformers are one of the most critical elements in any power network.
byJorge Piñeros
Introduction:
Electricity has become a vital part of everyday life and is required for almost everything we do, and transformers are one of the most critical elements in any power network.
During the life of a transformer, the asset will be subjected to various conditional and environmental stresses, including over voltages, short circuits, emergency overloading, and failing accessories – which can substantially decrease the expected life of the transformer. In addition, many network transformers in service are over 40 years old, which, in combination, creates unpredictability in the assets performance and greatly increases the risk of a costly, unplanned, or catastrophic failure.
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As the world leader in transformer manufacturing, services, and asset performance management, Hitachi ABB Power Grids has come up with a solution designed for anyone who needs to do more with less.
The TXpert™ Ecosystem is designed with the users in mind, whose job it is to track, understand, protect, and maintain these critical grid assets. With an unmatched return on investment, this solution can identify risks early enough to: prevent unplanned outages; replace time-based with condition-based maintenance; reduce maintenance and operation costs; optimize asset utilization and enable risk-optimized maintenance schedules. TXpert™ technology can be used both in new transformers and as an upgrade for an existing fleet.
Be prepared for today and for the unknowns of tomorrow with digitalization.
Renewable energy performance considerations
Renewable energy generation installations are fast evolving but can still be regarded as a relatively new application area. As a part of this ongoing evolution, they have experienced several design and performance challenges that have not always been fully addressed during the development of the project specifications. These issues have included transient overvoltages, harmonics, transformer saturation, power factor, reactive power, and voltage control.
Hitachi ABB Power Grids has been a major supplier of equipment for renewable power development for many years and has supported customers in this dynamic and highly demanding application area.
To address these challenges, Hitachi ABB Power Grids has designed a digital ecosystem that provides insights for customers to control the variables that influence the state of the transformer. This digital ecosystem provides direct monitoring and diagnosis of the asset’s performance, including load and overload cycles that are highly variable in the application of renewable projects; estimation of the transformer life expectancy by observing thermal behavior and monitoring moisture content and gases in the transformer oil; monitoring key transformer accessories such as bushings and on-load tap changer, and centralizing all signals from digitally-conditioned transformer monitoring equipment.
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