Elewit, Redeia's technology platform, has organised three webinars this week to present PDEye internationally. One of them has been co-organised with Redinter, Redeia's subsidiary in Latin America, as it targets this market.
PDEye is a new dedicated platform for predictive maintenance which enables critical asset functional anomalies identification at early stages, which has been co-developed by Elewit, Red Eléctrica and Ampacimon.
The sessions, which were attended by around 70 people which had an international target audience, were attended by users from countries such as the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Belgium, Norway, Great Britain, Portugal, Peru and Chile. The webinars were conducted by Óscar García, Product Manager at Elewit; Antonio Sánchez, technician responsible for projects and protections in the Substation Engineering Department at Red Eléctrica; and Fernando Garnacho, Sales Manager BlueBOX Technology at Ampacimon.
This initiative dedicated to the development of a technology capable of identifying functional anomalies at early stages in critical assets arises as a response to possible incidents that may take place in the transmission grid and whose consequences could compromise the quality and continuity of the electric supply.
These assets, such as transformers, transmission lines and electricity substations, play a key role in energy supply and any failure in their operation can have a significant impact on the stability and efficiency of the entire grid.
Early detection of functional anomalies allows preventive action to be taken before issues may escalate. In order to achieve such objective, it is a key point that operators and maintenance teams can anticipate these potential problems, take corrective actions and therefore reduce unplanned outages risks.
Aiming to offer solutions for challenges such as this one, Elewit, Red Eléctrica and Ampacimon launched PDEye in 2021 as an innovation project, which was at first developed internally and thanks to the good results achieved, it was scaled up and ended up as a product to be launched on the market, thus becoming a tool of Redeia's maintenance unit catalog. PDEye has therefore become a disruptive solution at asset’s predictive maintenance which allows functional anomalies to be identified at early stages.
Óscar García, Product Manager at Elewit, pointed out that "PDEye is a true reflection of how Elewit's innovation projects generate solutions which solve real problems in our companies. Thanks to Red Eléctrica's experts’ knowledge, our partners are now able to develop products with feasible results faster and Red Eléctrica has new tools which allow optimising and improving its O&M processes".
How does the platform work? It monitors critical variables, and thanks to its small discharges detection capabilities that occur prior to the most severe incidents (partial discharges), PDEye is able to calculate and analyse the health of grid assets using artificial intelligence which allows maintenance action planning.
This way, PDEye provides an effective way to detect manufacturing or installation issues in multiple components in electrical network assets, as well as insights about gradual deterioration of components over the years, external anomalies, damage and exposure to heat cycles. A useful solution for cables, transformers, terminations, gas insulated systems, switchgear and other components performance monitoring.
Antonio Sánchez, from Red Eléctrica, pointed out that "although we are enormously proud of the results and improvements in efficiency and safety provided by the PDEye Platform, we are even more proud of the collaboration of the companies which participated in its development. What would be the limits if we all generously provided with resources, experience and knowledge?".
Other significant benefits of PDEye
In addition to risk prevention, the development of technologies such as PDEye which identify functional anomalies at early stages offer other significant benefits. On the one hand, it improves the efficiency and lifetime of critical assets, as maintenance interventions can be planned proactively and based on the actual condition of the equipment. Operational and maintenance costs are reduced, so are downtime and associated losses.
On the other hand, this technology also contributes to a more resilient and flexible power grid by detecting and precisely addressing anomalies. Furthermore, data analysis and the identification of anomalous patterns can provide valuable information for strategic decision-making, such as infrastructure investment planning and grid optimisation.
Finally, Fernando Garnacho, from Ampacimon, indicated that "participating in innovation projects alongside TSOs allows us to develop solutions adapted to our customers from the the very beginning. PDEye is a milestone in the field of partial discharges by automating their complicated analysis and interpretation".