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For the tenth installment of our “Transformer Tuesday” series we’re taking our dedicated readers along on a journey with Annie the Asset Manager from ABC Power as she discovers how to provide the stronger supporting evidence required to approve rate case changes.
This is the ninth installment of our blog series, “Transformer Tuesday,” brought to you by VIA’s Will Chapman. In this series, we’ll address how leading utilities use VIA’s GDAC™ solution to manage their substation transformers with greater ease, insight, and cost effectiveness.
Grid reliability requires thoughtful preventative maintenance and replacements of critical assets like substation transformers. With soaring retirement rates and a tough hiring market, many utilities are faced with making hard asset health decisions with limited time and historical knowledge.
Taking a step back
Take a minute to put yourself in the shoes of an asset manager.
You are responsible for creating multi-year asset plans to address grid infrastructure vulnerabilities and replacement strategies.
There are dozens of different pieces of equipment at each substation and knowing the performance and health of each asset is both an essential and ongoing challenge.
Utility Asset Manager
You, like many others on your team, rely on the expertise of long-standing experts in your company who have acquired years of insight into an asset. They can provide colorful context and guidance on what happened historically or how to interpret certain results.
Your most knowledgeable expert is set to retire at the end of the year. How will you transfer all the knowledge you don’t know? You don’t even know what you need to ask about certain assets!
To make the best use of your most valuable assets with years of knowledge, experience, and pattern recognition, you need a way to transfer that critical insight to the new workforce.
Navigating the realities of the times
With 50% of the utility workforce set to retire within the next 10 years, the electricity sector having difficulties hiring replacement personnel, and the vast amounts of experience and knowledge needed to have a deep understanding of asset performance and health, there is a potential looming threat to reliability efforts.
Thoughtful data analysis can help to address reliability challenges caused by limited organizational knowledge of transformer health.
Pooling the shared knowledge and analysis of a single utility’s transformer fleet with the analysis of other utilities’ transformer fleets allows you to predict the future health condition multiple years in advance.
How thoughtful analysis helps to ensure reliability
VIA’s Global Data Asset Collaborative™ (GDAC™) has all of the above ingredients to make thoughtful and accessible analysis to ensure reliability!
The web-based GDAC™ portal conveniently flags high risk transformers so that utility employees don’t have to manually aggregate and analyze data across multiple databases and reports.
The “Highest Risk Transformers” report flags transformers most at risk of failure.
With this insight, asset experts and strategic planners can filter and customize their searches on factors they are most interested in. Identifying early indicators of condition decline or trends in recent failures can be done in several clicks – giving utilities valuable time back when creating their asset management planning.
A transformer flagged for Dissolved Gas Analysis (DGA) concerns.
GDAC™ provides downloadable, visual reports so utilities can provide any supporting evidence to replacement recommendations, including private multi-utility benchmark comparisons. With this unique capability, utilities can see how the health of their individual transformers stack up against transformers owned by other utilities, like what you see below.
Want to expand your organization’s transformer knowledge base?
Reach out to me on LinkedIn or email sales@solvewithvia.com to set up some time to chat about how GDAC™ can help you plan for the future.
This is the seventh installment of our blog series, “Transformer Tuesday,” brought to you by VIA’s Will Chapman. In this series, we’ll address how leading utilities use VIA’s GDAC™ solution to manage their substation transformers with greater ease, insight, and cost effectiveness.
Electric utilities have a hard job. They have to ensure reliability to their customers in the midst of:
With constrained budgets, rising transformer costs, and longer lead times, how can utilities ensure they accurately prioritize the right transformer replacements now and in the future?
GDAC™ provides utilities with the tools needed to precisely prioritize transformer replacement
There is a cost effective solution that provides utilities with insights into the current and projected health of transformers at a cost any utility can afford: VIA’s Global Data Asset Collaborative™ (GDAC™).
GDAC™ provides a secure way for utilities to pool data about their transformers (including data from measurement tests like dissolved gas analysis, oil, and furan) without compromising data privacy. By pooling data from multiple utilities, the key differentiator of GDAC™, robust quantities of data are made available for artificial intelligence (AI) to train accurate models to predict transformer health 1-10 years in advance.
GDAC™ leverages a completely transparent Condition Based Rating (CBR) system that is based on industry standards and was co-created and validated by our founding utility partners. This gives asset managers confidence in how the rating is created and helps make it easier to interpret what to do with the results.
All of these insights are made available to asset managers in one place, in the convenience of a web-based portal. Some example reports from the GDAC™ portal that our current members love:
Utilities can use the 10-Year Condition Forecast report for a bird’s eye view of their fleet’s health, compared to other GDAC™ partners.
For more actionable granularity, GDAC™’s Highest Risk Transformers page flags individual transformers that currently have issues and are forecasted to decline over the next 3 years.
Want to accurately assess your transformers current and future condition?
Send me a note on LinkedIn or email sales@solvewithvia.com to set up some time to chat and get a free analysis of your most at risk transformers.
This is the sixth installment of our blog series, “Transformer Tuesday,” brought to you by VIA’s Will Chapman. In this series, we’ll address how leading utilities use VIA’s GDAC™ solution to manage their substation transformers with greater ease, insight, and cost effectiveness.
For 50 years, substation transformers were built to run during the day and taper down at night to cool. Now, picture your neighborhood lined with electric vehicles (EVs). Once your neighbors end their workdays and don’t need to use their vehicles anymore, they plug their EVs in to “juice up”.
While this is convenient for EV drivers, this significantly increased demand for evening voltage places additional wear-and-tear on the electricity grid during times when transformers are used to cooling down. In this scenario, transformers stay running and can overheat or experience a malfunction (not unlike a car if you think about it).
According to a 2021 McKinsey report, U.S. EV sales increased by nearly 200% between the second quarter of 2020 and the second quarter 2021. This number is expected to rise as a result of $7.5 billion EV infrastructure funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
Growing fleets of EVs will clearly require utilities to expand their power capacity, and therefore, optimize or add transformers to handle more intense power requirements throughout the day and evening. This leads to critical questions like:
Which transformers should a utility repair, replace, or buy to add to their grids first?
Which units and future plans can wait?
How much will all of this cost?
Utility asset managers need to understand which transformers in their fleet are most at risk as EV penetration increases. VIA’s Global Data Asset Collaborative™ (GDAC™) can help.
Engaging with EV Stressors
Despite higher rates of EV adoption and challenges related to where and when EVs are being charged, utilities need to maintain the highest standards for electricity reliability and resiliency for their customers. GDAC™ identifies cases where transformers have unexpected declines in health condition, at an early age or in an area where previous transformer condition was consistent. These situations are good indicators to intervene sooner or review the assets in place.
Utilities analyze historical and forecasted transformer condition changes (e.g., downgrades) in locations where EV adoption is high.
The GDAC™ portal conveniently flags high risk transformers for utilities so that they don’t have to parse through multiple databases, reports, and analyses, saving them invaluable time and effort. As a result, utilities can allocate resources to the transformers most in need, allowing them to work smarter.
As shown in the diagram to the left, utilities easily identify transformers in need of maintenance or replacement due to EV-related stressors. Utilities also glean insights from transformers located at the same substation experiencing similar EV stressors.
GDAC™ analyses like these help utility personnel with or without analysis experience to identify which transformers to repair, replace, or buy; which units and future plans can wait; and how much it will cost to address EV-related stressors.
Want to go for a ride with GDAC™?
Reach out to me via LinkedIn or email sales@solvewithvia.com to learn more about the ways GDAC™ can help you be prepared for EV-related stressors on your transformer fleet.
This is the fifth installment of our new blog series, “Transformer Tuesday,” brought to you today by VIA’s SVP, Strategic Initiatives, Joe Babiec. In this series, we’ll address how leading utilities use VIA’s GDAC™ solution to manage their substation transformers with greater ease, insight, and cost effectiveness.
Last week’s Transformer Tuesday post by my colleague, Will Chapman, highlighted the way GDAC™ member utilities can learn from each other’s experiences. In particular, joining GDAC™ can help a utility prepare for challenges that they haven’t yet had to solve for or frequently experienced in their own transformer fleet. This shared knowledge not only helps utilities learn from each other, but can also help save on costly transformer failures.
This week, we want to highlight the value a specific GDAC™ member, Hawaiian Electric, brings to the entire collaborative.
Hawaiian Electric is one of GDAC™’s founding member utilities. The company serves 95% of Hawaiʻi’s 1.4 million residents on the islands of Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi Island, Maui, Lānaʻi, and Molokaʻi.
Hawaiian Electric has been referred to in the industry as a “postcard from the future.” With very high levels of distributed solar penetration, they are rapidly transforming their grid to provide 100% renewable energy by 2045. Hawaiian Electric has already accumulated considerable experience dealing with a host of unprecedented challenges related to clean energy that many in the industry will not face for several years. Utility Dive recognized Hawaiian Electric’s trailblazing efforts and named the company “Utility of the Year.”
Hawaiian Electric has been contributing valuable insights on substation transformers to the collaborative since 2019. Having their experience included in GDAC™’s many benchmarks allows other utilities to better anticipate how their transformers might behave and how long they might last, as a result of accelerating clean energy technology adoption in their service areas.
In addition to enabling valuable benchmarking, Hawaiian Electric, like other GDAC™ members, is sharing their hard-won operational insights during VIA-hosted GDAC™ workshops. Topics often include fleet management practices, plans, and challenges, as well as the future GDAC™ enhancements that would provide the most value to all utilities.
Hawaiian Electric illustrated the value of the collaborative best themselves:
“Like most electric utilities, Hawaiian Electric does its best to maximize use of grid infrastructure, some of which are nearing the end of their practical use,” said Rick Pinkerton, Director, Asset Management at Hawaiian Electric. “As we modernize our grid, we’re always looking for ways to improve our decision making. We joined GDAC™ to learn from other members and from VIA’s expertise in AI and machine learning, to improve our capabilities to prudently manage the performance, risk, and cost of our fleet of substation transformers, and other T&D assets in general.”
If you would like to learn about how GDAC™ can help your utility to “future proof” by learning from the experience of trailblazing companies like Hawaiian Electric, reach out to me on LinkedIn or email sales@solvewithvia.com to set up some time to chat and get a free analysis of your most at risk transformers.
This is the third installment of our new blog series, “Transformer Tuesday,” brought to you by VIA’s Will Chapman. In this series, we’ll address how leading utilities use VIA’s GDAC™ solution to manage their substation transformers with greater ease, insight, and cost effectiveness.
Aging electric grid components threaten the reliable, safe delivery of electricity. With substation transformer costs ranging anywhere from a few hundred thousand dollars to more than $5 million, the decision to replace these assets requires careful long-term capital investment planning. Unexpected transformer failures can upset those plans and requesting regulators to revise a utility’s rate case is not quick or guaranteed.
Here is an example of a situation that can arise when a transformer fails suddenly. If, say, Transformer 1 fails, a utility can decide to redeploy funds originally planned for the replacement of Transformer 2 into emergency purchasing of a brand new, Transformer 3. The result of this decision is that the utility needs to find a way to extend the lifespan of Transformer 2 since funds allocated to replace this transformer have gone to purchasing a new one.
So, how do utilities typically solve dilemmas like these and others?
Performing consistent maintenance is a sensible approach because aging transformers can have their lifespan extended, and it helps to defer replacement spending. To guide their maintenance work, utilities turn to predictive analytics to detect which transformers are at the greatest risk of failure. There are some helpful analytics that exist in the marketplace, however, there is a catch to predictive analytics: to be effective, they need a sufficient amount of data about transformers during normal periods of operation and leading up to faults and failure events.
Events like substation transformer failures don’t happen frequently (thankfully). But, utilities with too few failure events may not have a sufficient amount of transformer data on their own to train accurate predictive models, like Utility A on the left of the diagram below.
In principle, Utility A could address this challenge of data scarcity by exchanging data with other utilities so each utility has enough data to train and apply their predictive models and benchmarks, as shown on the chart to the right above. However, in practice, sharing sensitive operational data with other organizations presents serious privacy and security risks. Even if those risks are managed, utilities often keep their data in different or even incompatible formats. Utilities can find themselves needing so much time accessing and preparing data for analysis that they lack timely insights or have to abandon predictive analysis altogether.
VIA’s Global Data Asset Collaborative™ (GDAC™) overcomes these problems.
The Bridge to Predictive Insights
GDAC™ solves for each of the obstacles mentioned above: data scarcity, data privacy and security risks, and different data formats. With GDAC™, each utility retains complete control of its data and is able to connect to utility-controlled data locations. The collaborative does this by establishing a secure, privacy-protecting bridge between each company’s data and GDAC™ predictive analytics.
Leveraging GDAC™, utilities can prevent unanticipated transformer failures by:
With GDAC™ (pictured above), utilities can forecast individual transformer health anywhere from 1 to 3 years in advance.
By using GDAC™, utilities share access to, not copies of, valuable transformer data and learn from the combined valuable experiences with faults and failures. This enables GDAC™ member utilities to reliably predict transformer failures and minimize unexpected replacement scenarios.
Want to expand your transformer knowledge base?
Reach out to me on LinkedIn or email sales@solvewithvia.com to set up some time to chat and get a free analysis of your most at risk transformers.
VIA had a record attendance of nearly 30 participants at the second installment of its GDAC™ Virtual Mini-Series this week. The session included customers from the US, Asia, and New Zealand and participants located in four different time zones, all eager to share their strategy and asset management experience for substation transformers.
The highlight of the event was the GDAC™ member panel led by Cristiano Marantes, Chief Executive of Ara Ake, an organization that connects technology innovation with energy industry leaders to lower emissions in New Zealand. The panel covered questions related to:
Kate Ravanis, COO, remarked that “it was highly reaffirming to hear that the GDAC™ portal, launched earlier this year, was already being used to save time (one “person month” in one case) to prepare asset management plans and rate case materials.”
This was one of many comments by participants in addition to the engineering and maintenance insights that were shared over the 90-minute session.
VIA is thrilled with the response to the mini-series and will continue hosting member (and potential member) events in the future.
To learn more about the GDAC™ program or to try out the 30-Minute Pilot, visit our website.
VIA and Hawaiian Electric are pleased to share that Hawaiian Electric has extended its commitment to the Global Data Asset Collaborative™ (GDAC™): Substation Transformers. By extending and expanding its commitment to GDAC™, Hawaiian Electric hopes to further improve decision making and regulatory support related to its transformer fleet. In its second year, Hawaiian Electric plans to use GDAC™ to more effectively assess the current and predicted health of its transformers to better plan and prioritize proactive replacements, strengthen spares assessment and contingency planning, and identify opportunities to further enhance its substation transformer preventive maintenance.
Hawaiian Electric recognized that GDAC™, from its founding, has the potential to develop new insights and enhance its current predictive capabilities by using advanced data science and analytics to learn from Hawaiian Electric’s and partner utilities’ historical transformer condition and failure data. Since then, in 2019, Hawaiian Electric helped increase GDAC™ membership by including its Maui County and Hawaiʻi Island operating areas, to expand analysis from more than 300 substation transformers on Oʻahu to 500-plus across Maui, Lānaʻi, Molokaʻi, and Hawaiʻi Island.
“Hawaiian Electric has in the past performed various types of predictive analytics to forecast annual failures, determine adequate spares inventory, and estimate expected remaining life for our substation transformers. We joined GDAC™ to enhance our capabilities by learning from other members and learning more about the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning,” said Rick Pinkerton, Hawaiian Electric director of asset planning & strategy.
“We’re thrilled that Hawaiian Electric has extended its GDAC™ membership. At the end of last year, Hawaiian Electric was named “Utility of the Year” by Utility Dive for being a trailblazer in the industry and for its commitment to 100% clean energy by 2045 or earlier. Having the support of such an innovative and driven company can only help lead the entire utility industry to a more data-driven future,” said Kristen Merrill, VIA’s Vice President, Client Delivery.
Hawaiian Electric is supporting the recruitment of other members to join GDAC™: Substation Transformers to bolster predictive capabilities, gain more insights about their fleet, and to share practices and expertise.
About VIA
VIA helps governments, regulators, and power companies deliver $200Bn in energy every year to more than 100 million customers. VIA’s privacy-preserving analytics software, Trusted Analytics Chain™ (TAC™) reduces the cost and improves the quality of service of electricity transmission and distribution using AI and blockchain technologies. TAC™ (patents pending) is the bridge that securely connects power company data, distributed across many locations, to potential AI solutions. VIA established the Global Data Asset Collaborative™ (GDAC™), built on top of TAC™, to allow multiple companies to securely pool data for more accurate analytics. Headquartered in Somerville, Massachusetts, VIA has received an InnovateMass grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center and has been featured in Wired and Inc. Magazine for its leadership in technology innovation. For more information, please visit www.solvewithvia.com.
About Hawaiian Electric
Hawaiian Electric serves 95 percent of Hawaiʻi’s 1.4 million residents on the islands of Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi Island, Maui, Lānaʻi and Molokaʻi, and has a goal of 100 percent renewables by 2045.
Last week, VIA was proud to host the first session of its GDAC™ Virtual Mini-Series. The event was invite-only and had over 20 participants including members from founding utilities, Hawaiian Electric and Vector.
VIA advisor and former ABB executive, Andrew Bright gave a keynote presentation on two topics: physical resiliency trends for power transformers and trends in sensors.
In addition to Andrew’s keynote, VIA presented “GDAC™ By The Numbers” (click image below) that covered quick stats on data, equipment, portal enhancements, and more for members.
Given the success of this first event, VIA hopes to continue the series and open it up to external participants to allow for a better understanding of GDAC™’s value. If you are interested in learning more about GDAC™, please email gdac@solvewithvia.com.
The article published by T&D World “Global Data Asset Collaborative to Increase ROI for Utilities” discusses changes to the energy landscape and how “many utilities recognize that the challenge of maintaining grid reliability is now greater than any single company is able to solve on its own.”
VIA’s Global Data Asset Collaborative™ (GDAC™) was established in early 2019 to allow multiple companies to securely pool data for more accurate analytics. The benefits of GDAC™ are featured in the article:
Both utilities and regulators benefit from GDAC™. For utilities, what VIA has found is that by protecting the data of each company, the data issues become easier and the focus of analytics efforts returns to the analysis (not restrictions to sharing the data). The impact on members who take this collaborative approach is that they end up with greatly improved analytics. For example, members get benchmarks of their equipment condition and maintenance routines in a more real-time and customized manner. They also get the benefit of learning from issues that others have had rather than just issues that they have seen — this leads to earlier warnings about equipment. And finally, as an economic impact, GDAC™ members have been seeing fewer corrective maintenance callouts, better planning for spares and inventory, and faster and simpler preparation for rate cases.
For the full article, visit the T&D World website.
VIA’s Colin Gounden was interviewed, among a number of analytics and utilities experts, for the Utility Dive article “In the ‘cat and mouse game’ of utility cyberattacks, AI and machine learning show promise, limits.”
The article talks about ways AI and machine learning can help protect utilities and its customers from cyber attacks, while also using data to improve service to customers. Colin talks about how GDAC™ utility members are seeing value in AI:
“This is a whole new game for utilities,” Colin Gounden, CEO of data specialist VIA agreed. “They are increasingly interested in how AI algorithms and deep learning can automate the protection of customer information, the optimization and balancing of the grid, and the finding of efficiencies in the details of customer usage,” he told Utility Dive. “But AI requires access, particularly to data.”
Both [AI and ML] require an enormous amount of data, but it can be protected the same way email is scanned for spam by an AI algorithm “because it is too big a dataset for a person,” Gounden said.
For more quotes from Colin and the full article, visit the Utility Dive website.
VIA and Hawaiian Electric are pleased to share that Hawaiian Electric has joined GDAC™ alongside Vector, as the second founding member. By joining in the collaborative (which is in partnership with Elemental Excelerator) and focusing on substation transformers, Hawaiian Electric hopes to improve decision making related to operations, maintenance, and replacement of their substation transformers. In particular, its goal is to reduce unexpected issues or failures, determine the right spare equipment inventory levels, and reduce the frequency of corrective maintenance.
“Like most electric utilities, Hawaiian Electric does its best to maximize use of grid infrastructure, some of which are nearing the end of their practical use,” said Rick Pinkerton, Director, Asset Management at Hawaiian Electric. “As we modernize our grid, we’re always looking for ways to improve our decision making. We joined GDAC™ to learn from other members and from VIA’s expertise in AI and machine learning, to improve our capabilities to prudently manage the performance, risk, and cost of our fleet of substation transformers, and other T&D assets in general.”
During the inaugural GDAC™ workshop, Hawaiian Electric and fellow GDAC™ member, Vector, shared and discussed their current substation transformer fleet management practices, plans, and challenges, as well as specific GDAC™ efforts and outcomes that would provide the most value to each member.
“We’re thrilled to have Hawaiian Electric join the GDAC™ community. Hawaiian Electric has been referred to in the industry as a “postcard from the future” due to their high levels of distributed solar penetration, progress towards transforming their grid to provide 100 percent renewable energy by 2045, and experience dealing with a host of unprecedented challenges that many in the industry will not face for several years,” said Kate Ravanis, Chief Operating Officer at VIA. “Their position as an innovative leader in the industry and the contributions they made at the GDAC™ workshop were invaluable to other members and the overall project outcome.”
Hawaiian Electric will be contributing multiple years of operational, test, maintenance, and failure data from more than 300 substation transformers alongside similar data for Vector’s 200-plus substation transformers. The company is excited about joining the GDAC™ community and may have an interest in joining other GDAC™ initiatives, in addition to substation transformers.
About VIA
VIA helps energy companies across the globe realize the value of their data through AI and blockchain. The company works with the world’s largest utilities and government agencies on AI initiatives like predictive maintenance and contingency planning. VIA has developed a blockchain-based application, Trusted Analytics Chain™ (TAC™) to help energy companies reduce the burden of preparing and sharing their data. TAC™ (patents pending) is the bridge that securely connects power company data, distributed across many locations, to potential AI solutions. Headquartered in Somerville, Massachusetts, VIA has been featured in Wired and Inc. Magazine for its leadership in technology innovation. For more information, please visit www.solvewithvia.com.
About Hawaiian Electric
The Hawaiian Electric Companies (Hawaiian Electric Company, Maui Electric Company, and Hawaiʽi Electric Light Company) serve 95 percent of Hawaii’s 1.4 million residents on the islands of Oʽahu, Maui, Hawaiʽi Island, Lānaʽi and Molokaʽi and have a goal of 100 percent renewables by 2045.
VIA is thrilled to announce our partnership with Auckland-based energy company, Vector, to build the world’s first privacy preserving, multi-company database for machine learning-ready transformer data, called the Global Data Asset Collaborative™ (GDAC™): Transformers.
Simon Mackenzie, Group Chief Executive Officer at Vector, comments on the importance of this collaborative:
“With a larger, smarter and more collaborative data asset like the GDAC™ we can refine the information we depend on to keep our network assets in the best possible shape. This is becoming increasingly important as we transition the network to meet the needs of the new energy future, where new technologies like distributed energy resources and battery storage will integrate with the network at scale. We have a responsibility to make this transition as efficiently as we can, and without burdening customers with excessive infrastructure costs. Improving our data and analytics capability will play a central role in that.”
To read the full press release, visit Vector’s website.