This is the tenth 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.
The challenge
Annie the Asset Manager at ABC Power has one goal: provide reliable service at affordable rates for her customers. To do this, Annie needs to make sure that all of her substation transformers are healthy, but there are two hurdles:
The dilemma for Annie:
All replacement and maintenance decisions require additional financial investment from utilities.
Formal approval from ABC Power’s Board of Directors, Finance Team, and the Public Service Service Commission is needed in order to proceed with changing the rate and increasing costs for customers.
Her greatest challenge of all: Annie has limited time and resources to provide evidence to fully support her rate case claim.
The solution
Knowing she had to provide solid evidence to the larger group to increase her rate case, Annie started researching!
Annie found VIA’s Global Data Asset Collaborative™ (GDAC™) and reached out to VIA’s team to learn more.
Annie learned that GDAC™ performs anonymized benchmark comparisons of transformer health that may be earlier indicators of condition changes than IEEE or IEC standards. She also discovered that GDAC™ provides condition predictions 1-3 years in advance for individual transformers, and 10 years at a fleet level.
Through a demonstration and free trial of the GDAC™ portal, Annie learned about GDAC™’s analytical reports that would support her replacement planning.
Annie signed up for GDAC™ and compared critical health variables of her individual transformers to the health of an anonymized benchmark fleet consisting of multiple utilities to further justify the rate case increase.
Annie got the evidence she needed through the benchmarks to get her rate case approved. In doing so, she was able to enhance service reliability for customers.
What’s next?
