POWER November 2021 - 33

TECHNOLOGY
2. New technology, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, is making it
easier to manage assets, ensuring the right maintenance is performed at the right time.
Source: Shutterstock
huge research and development groups.
Instead, we need to partner with an industry
that already has a culture of innovation-the
high-tech sector.
Digital
transformation powered by
the scale and economics of the cloud is
changing the way businesses operate.
Companies as diverse as Walmart and
Disney are using data to make evidencebased
decisions instead of operating on
gut feel. The result is business agility
that allows employees to focus on customer
experiences and respond quickly
to market demands as they come up.
We can take lessons from these use
cases and create innovative solutions
that will enable us to radically transform
the electric utility.
Asset Management Can Truly
Transform How Utilities Operate
Asset management is a great example
of an innovative technology we can use
to improve how we operate. The manufacturing
industry uses the Internet of
Things (IoT) and advanced networking
to monitor, control, and optimize
equipment on the factory floor. Logistics
companies-who we have a lot in
common with-use asset management
to streamline supply lines, map out optimal
routes, maintain fleets, and keep
drivers safe. It's not so hard to see how
these innovations can be applied to the
electrical grid.
A robust and innovative asset management
strategy can provide new insights
into grid health and behavior. It
can give us real-time awareness in the
control room. And, using powerful artificial
intelligence (AI) and machine
learning (ML) algorithms, we can truly
November 2021 | POWER
understand generation and consumption
trends, and take proactive actions
that make sense (Figure 2). Most importantly,
we can automate the maintenance
and upkeep of the grid in a
cost-efficient, practical manner.
Back in 2017, my company made the
decision to modernize the way we do
business in preparation for the inevitable
change we'd all been seeing. A team
consisting of design engineers and folks
from my digital organization were tasked
with automating existing processes to
enhance our asset management strategy.
Very quickly, however, it was clear
that it wasn't enough to improve how
we'd always done things. We had to
throw everything out the window and
completely change how we viewed our
assets, our operations, and our business
model. Thankfully, we found an excellent
partner in Hitachi Energy.
Alongside them, we created a new asset
management strategy, powered by
AI and ML, that improved our operations
and enabled us to transform into a new
kind of energy company. Here are three
ways we did it.
Proactively Avoid Outages. We are
a customer-led business whose core
mission is to ensure the lights stay on.
It is critical that we know the health
of our assets across the grid and how
problems will impact our ability to deliver
electricity. Monitors attached to
our grid assets feed health and performance
data to analytics engines powered
by numerous statistical methods
including AI and ML. This tells us the
condition and the risk, giving operators
the information they need to make critical
decisions around maintenance and
www.powermag.com
other actions they can take to proactively
avoid outages. Preventing critical
asset failures before they occur is key
to success in a business climate of everincreasing
customer expectations.
Extend Lifespan of Equipment. Operators
can apply the same condition
and risk information they use to avoid
outages to extend the lifespan of assets
by managing maintenance and
upgrades in a smarter, more intelligent
way. Instead of scheduling regular maintenance
once a month or once a year,
for example, we can use real data from
the assets themselves to determine
when they need some attention. This
reduces operational costs without increasing
risk of failure. Extending the
life of assets while lowering the cost of
maintenance allows us to invest in other
areas for increased reliability and flexibility
while keeping prices affordable.
Reduce Operational Costs and Improve
Safety. Only maintaining assets
when they need attention allows us to
switch from a preventive maintenance
strategy to a condition-based maintenance
strategy. This massively reduces
maintenance trips, saving a lot of money
while keeping our workers safer.
Catastrophic failures often occur in the
middle of the night or on the weekend,
leading to overtime while placing technicians
in less familiar work settings.
Eliminating these catastrophic failures
reduces operational costs and improves
worker safety.
It's Time to Innovate Our Way Through
Great Change
Changes to the power industry well beyond
our control will require a new culture
of innovation at utilities across the
country. It's critical that we partner with
technology companies that have a track
record of transforming other industries
to better compete in a modern world.
Asset performance management
powered by AI and ML can provide new
insights into grid health and behavior,
helping us better understand generation
and consumption trends, and take proactive
actions, while automating the maintenance
and upkeep of the grid. I want
to say that change is coming, but, in all
honesty, it's already here. It's time to
embrace these new, innovative technologies
to deliver on our promise to customers
well into the 21st century. ■
-Keith Hock is senior director of IT/OT,
Digital Field Services, and Innovation for
Ameren, a Fortune 500 electrical utility
operating in Missouri and Illinois.
33
http://www.powermag.com
POWER November 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of POWER November 2021
