Enel Wins Digital Utility Award for Predictive Maintenance

Enel SpA, a multinational energy company with over 60 million customers, was awarded the Digital Utility Transformation Award by Global Smart Energy Elites 2015. According to a Nov 5 release, the company was recognized for its use of predictive maintenance software by C3 Energy.

Enel has digitized 80 percent of its electric and gas distribution system—which encompasses 1.2 million miles and hundreds of thousands of substations—with automated sensors and controls.

Enel deployed the predictive maintenance application at over 16,000 substations serving 1 million customers in Italy. It used sensors to compile data from 10 data sources:

• SCADA
• Maintenance work orders
• Fault protection
• Asset management
• Historical equipment failures
• Known network issues
• Power quality
• Lightning
• Terrain and vegetation
• Weather

According to a press release, Enel used this data and 750 analytics to generate real-time insights and detect the probability of feeder faults, then pinpoint locations. This allows the company to address potential problems quickly saving money and reducing the change of outages.

RTInsights Take: The use of real-time analytics in the electricity sector has multiple value streams, including predictive maintenance, building-energy management, demand response, and fault correction and outage detection on the electric grid. Outages are estimated to cost the U.S. utility sector $80 billion a year. For predictive maintenance specifically, the cost of industrial electric equipment is very high: A gas turbine can cost up to $1 billion; a substation can easily run over $10 million. It is always much cheaper to repair such equipment than to replace it.

Related stories:

Predictive Maintenance: Teaching Old Machines New Tricks
Lessons Learned from Duke Energy’s Smart Grid Program
Building-Energy Management: An Optimization Challenge

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