Smart & Digital Power Station

Industry 4.0 & a growing trend in the electric power utility industry is the automated monitoring of remote sites and assets. An electric utility’s assets must be maintained and repaired on a continuous basis to prevent equipment failures and outages and to keep the system operating safely. With the challenge of keeping costs under control and service reliability high, knowing how to prioritize maintenance and repairs in order to provide the most efficient and cost-effective results is a huge benefit. The development of both sensor technology and communications networks is now providing the means to deploy solutions that can track the health of assets and plan when maintenance should be scheduled to prevent failures. To prevent the utility from being overloaded with the wealth of data from the field, there are also applications available to view the data in real-time and process it in order to determine health scores and predict when and how failures might occur. Sensor technology can also allow the utility to perform remote inspections to make more efficient use of man and machine hours.

This paper deals with the remote monitoring and control of various critical, important and costly equipment in a power station like power transformer, gas insulated switchgear, station battery bank and battery charger, capacitor bank and other vital aspects inside a station building, detrimental to the health of the assets for the station.