NYPA striving to become a digital utility
USA, New York: A New York state-owned utility strategically places sensors to avoid costly equipment failures.
NYPA
USA, New York: A New York state-owned utility strategically places sensors to avoid costly equipment failures.
NYPA embarked on an ambitious infrastructure modernization program. Striving to become the first end-to-end digital utility in the USA, the utility set out to prove it could analyze big data, derived from strategically placed sensors, to avoid costly equipment failures.
The potential savings from avoided failures on critical electrical equipment, such as circuit breakers, generators, transformers, and rotating machinery, is particularly valuable because of the often-long lead times on repairs and replacement.
As part of its sensor deployment initiative, NYPA engineering partnered with the Electric Power Research Institute to evaluate the most promising sensors for the utility’s critical assets. These included partial-discharge sensors for generators, circuit breaker monitoring, and a suite of sensors for high-voltage power transformers.
The utility selected several pieces of equipment that could be retrofitted to its existing fleet. This included transformer winding temperature probes, transformer insulator (bushing) health systems that calculate capacitance and power factor, and, most importantly, transformer-oil dissolved gas analyzers (DGA).
The DGA equipment installed under the sensor deployment program provides NYPA staff with three samples a day. Prior to the program, a sample would have been analyzed once or twice a year, as is common in the electric utility industry. Chances are an evolving failure such as this would not have been caught in time to prevent a complete failure of the transformer, which would have resulted in extensive unplanned outage time, lost opportunity, and far greater repair costs.
When ideas and technology come together in asset performance management platforms, such as those at NYPA, personnel using advanced technology ensure reliable operation while keeping people safe, assets healthy and systems compliant.
Source: T&D World