(MENAFN- Qatar News Agency) Qatar General Electricity and Water Corporation (Kahramaa) has initiated the mega project of condition monitoring for asset management of 11kV electricity distribution network to enhance its performance and reliability, the first project of its kind in the GCC.
The move comes within Kahramaa's endeavors to achieve its mission of providing high quality and sustainable electricity and water for better living in Qatar, the corporation said Tuesday in a press release.
The project is being executed by the Electricity Distribution Department with the aim of carrying out a comprehensive condition monitoring program of more than 11,000 electricity distribution substations in-live condition (in service condition) within a time-frame of three years.
The goal was to have assessment of the health of the entire fleet of assets and prioritize the interventions based on the severity of the condition and criticality of the asset. Each asset is monitored for a set of condition parameters and a quantified scoring system is used to represent the asset health as per actual site conditions.
The asset health model was evolved based on Kahramaa's experience and recommendations as per international standards. The objective of the asset health model is to effectively support advanced strategies in the field of asset maintenance, asset replacement, and risk-aware grid operation. These strategies move from time-based, to condition-based and to reliability-based maintenance, considering the condition and criticality of each piece of equipment.
Various indices were developed such as asset health index, asset maintenance index, probability of failure, estimated residual life, asset criticality index, asset risk index, which provide useful information to assess the situation of the distribution assets and support the decision making process for the right action to be performed on the asset.
Up until 2015, Kahramaa has completed the condition monitoring of 69 percent of its network which involves more than 7,750 Substations and more than 45,000 assets. The overall asset health index stands at 94 percent, reflecting the good conditions of the assets. Out of 45,190 assets inspected so far, 97 percent of the assets are in good/very good condition and only percent of the assets are categorized as fair.
Given that the project is still in execution stage and about 62 percent of the project is completed, the benefits are already visible.
Corrective and prioritized actions were performed on many assets that were defective and deficient, thus, avoiding a potential fault of power supply interruption to the customers. This has been achieved by identifying assets with abnormalities and prioritized action implemented for all such assets to avoid failures / interruption in power supply to the customers. The project has helped in lowering the faults in the substation assets by 50 percent.
Kahramaa has shared this experience in various conferences and technical journals. Considering the success of this project, the corporation strives to undertake new initiatives in line with Qatar National Vision 2030 to enhance further the reliability of its network, ensuring safety and improvement in customer satisfaction.
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