The event was organized by the PES Columbus chapter. It was co-sponsored by PES Region 2. The speaker was Abigail J Zafris, an AEP engineer. The event was very successful and received well by participants. There were more than 50 attendees. The abstract of the event is below:
AEP has deployed a standard monitoring package on over 400 transmission-level power transformer and oil-filled shunt reactor assets with the primary goal of failure prevention. Deploying a comprehensive monitoring package on a multitude of assets creates a high volume of alarms, notifications, and data, with varying degrees of importance. To prevent asset failures, an effective monitor data management plan must be implemented. Without this plan, valuable information will be overlooked or delivered to personnel that do not have the expertise to respond appropriately.
An effective monitor data management plan must include data infrastructure, alarm ownership, and stakeholder training. AEP’s asset monitoring data infrastructure relies heavily on data concentrators utilizing IEC 61850 protocol, email alerts, data mapped to the SCADA System, and a PI Historian to house monitor data. AEP’s alarm ownership strategy has evolved over time as a result of continuous improvement efforts. As a result, the operations alarm guide was revised to indicate the most appropriate team for every alarm.
After the data infrastructure and alarm ownership have been established, key stakeholders must be trained to respond appropriately to alarms. At AEP, a class was launched for field personnel, covering transformer and reactor monitoring equipment. As a result, field personnel are better prepared to respond appropriately to the alarms for which they are responsible. Additionally, key operations personnel who provided 24/7 technical support were trained on asset monitoring equipment.
With an effective data management plan in place, AEP Transmission has been able to prevent a wide variety of failure types with differing timeframes. These failure preventions include bushing health issues, elevated dissolved gas, high levels of partial discharge, and transformer abnormal pressure.
Moving forward, AEP will continue to refine its monitor data management plan. AEP is focusing on automating data management to increase operational awareness. Much of this automation is facilitated by increasing the wealth of data available in the PI Historian and establishing automatic data analysis within PI. New monitoring systems are also following the same monitoring data management plan. With the right data infrastructure, clear alarm ownership and effective training, the groundwork has been established to enable these systems to be easily integrated into the existing processes, providing immediate value and benefit to AEP.
