Supernova Award Category

The Problem

As is the case with many utilities, Hydro One was faced with replacing a number of aging assets and identified four key areas of the business that would benefit from improvement through the use of data analytics: improving grid reliability, managing asset risk, reducing the cost of asset maintenance, and leveraging the data being gathered by smart meters to determine load patterns. The organization also needed a deeper look at various risk factors that may have interfered with service and wanted to be able to actively prevent service interruptions as a result of these deeper insights. 

The Solution

Hydro One was facing a problem utilities around the world struggle with - managing aging infrastructure - and the company knew they needed an updated system to maintain this aging infrastructure, which would require a 360 degree view into its 4.5 million assets, including the service fleet, smart meters, utility poles, and transformers around the service area. Critical to the success of the solution was the ability to access and correlate data in approximately 30 different systems including smart meter data, asset data in an SAP system, and asset and grid performance data, and then analyze and visualize all of this data. s. Integrating pre-existing BusinessObjects reports was also an important requirement. Hydro One decided to implement Space-Time Insight’s Asset Intelligence solution that uses advanced analytics to assess asset health and risk, and visualizes the results of that analysis along with data from other systems in detailed maps, charts and other formats. 

The results

Prior to implementing Space-Time Insight’s solution, Hydro One was tasked with manually monitoring all physical assets; this included sending field workers to routinely, and often unnecessarily, perform expensive checks on assets in remote locations. Without an understanding of asset risk, it was difficult for Hydro One to prioritize asset maintenance and replacement initiatives, and justify CapEx investments, leaving the organization vulnerable to service interruptions. The implementation of Asset Intelligence allows Hydro One to better understand the health of its asset fleet, formulate plans for cost-effectively managing it over time, and have the data at hand to justify to regulators, the investments required to maintain electric grid reliability and safety.

Metrics

• First year organization-wide savings of $1.5M with additional years projected at 6 times that amount
• Internal productivity has increased 4x since implementing the solution as personnel now spend the majority of their time doing their job instead of collecting data to do so
• The system is projected to eliminate 900 transformer failures over the next 7 years.

The Technology

Space-Time Insight Asset Intelligence (http://www.spacetimeinsight.com/solutions/utilities/asset-intelligence/)

Disruptive Factor

It is always challenging for utilities to justify capital investments to regulators given the difficulty of collecting and analyzing all the data available. Recently, Hydro One was able to revolutionize this process by using their Asset Intelligence application to show what asset replacement and maintenance was required, and highlight the implications of not making those investments. In addition, although the application was initially intended for asset managers, the system overcame the complexities of accessing and analyzing disparate data from so many different systems, making it a valuable resource to hundreds of other employees across the company.

Traditionally, utilities have used n+1 redundancy techniques to manage failure of critical assets and components. However, given lengthy replacement cycles and variances in vegetation, load growth and weather conditions, assets tend to age in different ways that lead to unique failure patterns and scenarios.

Shining Moment

Hydro One’s situational intelligence system considers many variables including network connectivity, load, age and maintenance data in the calculation of risk scores. One result of this is that the weak links in transmission lines or distribution feeders become easy to determine, helping personnel focus in on the assets needing the most attention.