CIGRE to provide world-class insights for managing ageing substation equipment

CIGRE has undertaken the biggest and most comprehensive global reliability survey ever carried out on HV equipment. The survey represents a service experience of over 280,000 circuit breaker years, 930,000 disconnector earth-switch years, 1.2 million instrument transformer years and 88,000 GIS circuit breaker years.

The detailed results are available to CIGRE members from e-Cigré in the form of six detailed technical brochures. The survey concluded that ageing is the single largest contributing factor of poor reliability of HV equipment. The pie chart below is an extract from technical brochure reference 510 and summarises the root causes of plant failure determined in the survey.

Managing an ageing high voltage asset population is a key challenge for utilities and other asset owners. Effective management of these assets delivers the best value both to asset owners and utility customers. In the current environment, as many high voltage equipment assets are coming of age, the affordability, access and deliverability constraints present a much greater challenge.

Originating from the global survey findings and in response to the challenges outlined above, CIGRE has established a working group A3.29 to specifically look at deterioration of ageing substation equipment and possible mitigation techniques. This is an international working group led by Ankur Maheshwari of Western Power (Western Australia). The working group will provide guidance on the ageing phenomenon of the high voltage equipment and possible mitigation techniques. This knowledge will assist asset owners to effectively and efficiently manage their high voltage equipment, and extract the most value from these assets.

The key deliverable

The key deliverable of the working group will be a publication released in 2015 in the form of a comprehensive Cigré technical brochure, covering the detection and management of ageing in HV substation equipment. We anticipate that application of the world-class  knowledge contained in that technical brochure should increase equipment reliability and network availability. This will support efficient deployment of resources and hence optimise network costs and extract the most value from the assets.

Progress on this key initiative will be reported and updated via our website www.cigreaustralia.org.au in the Latest News and project summaries sections.

Contributions to the survey are invited

Please click here for the survey cover and explanatory letter

Please click here for the Survey user manual

Please click here for the excel survey spreadsheet

If you have further questions, please  click here to send an email message.

Members can access the final poster here.