In the bulk power industry, maintaining reliable and stable electricity generation and distribution is paramount, and maintaining data collection and management uptime is essential to keeping the lights on.
Secure data collection improves planning efforts and enables coordinated responses to emergencies, while efficient data asset management ensures that critical information is accurate, up to date, and readily accessible. Of course, energy networks are often vast and cover massive distances, with vital assets distributed at wide intervals throughout.
Accurate gauge readings from these assets are a crucial step in the fight against downtime, but the labor cost and effort to periodically visit each site to determine operational capacity becomes a major investment over time.
In addition, data and reporting are often limited to local installation sites, making it impossible to automatically aggregate and report on data across a multi-site operation. Eliminating routine inspections of analog gauges without losing asset management capability requires the right tools, and the IoT Camera Sensor from Dynamics Ratings provides electricity transmission and distribution companies with a straightforward, low-cost method of monitoring analog gauges on utility assets.
Flexible, Reliable Data Reporting
Our IoT Camera Sensor ensures that critical data is securely and easily transmitted in real-time. It captures asset photos once per day, sending them back to the data hub, where gauge levels are then used in asset reporting and critical event alerting.
The IoT Camera Sensor is a battery-powered digital imaging device with integrated cellular, LoRaWAN or Itron mesh radio for wireless communications. It accommodates DNP3 into SCADA / DMS and APIs into the analytics platforms. This incredibly flexible technology supports cloud-based IoT platforms such as AWS, Azure, or on-premise servers, as well as Firmware upgrade Over the Air (FOTA).
The IoT Camera Sensor is used to:
- Provide alerts and alarms when gauges reach critical levels
- Reduce opex costs associated with site visits for asset inspection, call-outs, and maintenance
- Capture data for future maintenance planning
- Gather fault-detection data
- Reduce Asset Inspection costs by remotely reading gauges daily, instead of monthly or annually
- Provide daily temperature readings through its electronic temperature monitor
- Provide automated, real-time, data-driven, pre-emptive management of key assets
Improving System Reliability
The IoT Camera Sensor works with both legacy infrastructure and the Industrial Internet of Things network to improve reliability, automating enterprise asset management in real time, and keeping stakeholders informed at all times.
While legacy systems such as SCADA collect and store vast amounts of data, enabling historical analysis, performance analysis, troubleshooting, and predictive maintenance, they are also limited to data exchange in localized contexts. They often work exclusively in a one-to-one or point-to-point manner, making them difficult to update compared to cloud-based solutions. This makes the IoT Camera Sensor ideally suited for pairing with the ConnectGrid™ Smart Infrastructure Solution (SIS). Pairing these two technologies allows for the collection of critical data without the need for point-based protocols, as ConnectGrid™ requires no existing point-to-point communication infrastructure to operate.
ConnectGrid™ can be adjusted to meet a wide range of scalability and security requirements, providing a solution for automating and centralizing a simple but necessary asset management task. This simplicity and flexibility allows operators to optimize the performance of the electrical grid by centralizing and managing data on power generation, load demand, equipment status, and environmental conditions more efficiently and with less downtime.
Detecting problems in real time not only alerts stakeholders to abnormal or dangerous conditions, trends, or events, but also allows operators to intercept crises before they occur. This helps mitigate risk, reduce labor costs, improve compliance, and ultimately save lives.
Interconnected Solutions
Bulk power systems consist of complex and expensive equipment, but that doesn’t mean that data management solutions in the utilities industry have to be complicated. The pairing of the IoT Camera Sensor and the ConnectGrid™ system allows for a more proactive approach to data monitoring and reporting, minimizing downtime and extending the lifespan of critical assets in real-time.
Dynamic Ratings is proud to add these incredible assets to our suite of world-leading IoT asset monitoring solutions in the utilities industry as we continue to provide the insight necessary to drive reductions in capital and operational expenditure for utility companies across the globe.