UNLOCKING GRID PERFORMANCE

It’s nothing new that the electrical industry is changing, with new challenges and trends appearing all the time. It’s therefore essential that those in the industry keep up with the changes and meet these challenges head on. To that end, Megger has made it its mission to offer you a wide range of solutions to meet your needs, as well as the trends and demands of the market. Megger has a wide range of supplemental technologies for condition monitoring and predictive maintenance to improve reliability and optimise your grid performance. Indeed, the grid is under more strain today than ever before, with stressors coming from renewable resources, varying power generation and consumption, and extreme weather conditions, to name a few. As such, increasing the visibility of your grid has never been more important.

Megger’s evolution in testing, diagnostics, and condition monitoring

Megger has been a leader in the electrical industry for test and measurement equipment for over a century. Megger’s instruments are used globally by power utilities, repair shops, and industrial production plants. Thanks to modern trends, such as electrification and decarbonisation, they are also used in a range of other industries including transportation and renewable energy.

We never stop evolving and it is essential that we understand the changing needs of our customers so that we can continue offering modern, comprehensive, and relevant solutions. As such, we work closely with our customers, listening to their feedback and ideas and, in response, constantly develop and invest in new technologies, all so that we can provide them with the solutions they need.

Our view of the future includes continued innovations and new solutions, especially in on-line monitoring. We also want to give you a closer look into our monitoring business and show you how you can benefit from Megger’s Grid Performance Solutions, such as with our Grid Analytics Solutions.

Unlocking visibility by monitoring your grid with Megger

Off-line testing devices are essential for asset condition analysis; they allow flexibility and manipulation of testing voltage, ensuring that assets will perform well under stress and giving you a comprehensive picture of their present performance, as well as predicting their future performance and identifying any risks. Additionally, trending off-line test results provide you with even more insight and analytics, allowing you to be more confident in your decision making.

However, in between testing phases, unexpected events can occur that may be missed, or their detection delayed. This is where Megger’s monitoring solutions can help. Through continuous data collection, they provide real-time fault detection, and can even identify weak spots, allowing you to prevent faults and failures before they occur.

By combining data from various sources, including off-line and on-line measurements, we can help you to increase your grid’s visibility and improve your overall grid performance, giving you the detailed information necessary for good decision making and successful asset management.

PD monitoring – What else?

Not only are we well established in the electrical testing industry, but we also have decades of experience in asset monitoring, particularly the monitoring of partial discharge (PD). The industry has recognised PD as an important indicator in insulation that needs to be detected. We understand that predictive maintenance requires you to know about upcoming problems as early as possible, and there is no method that can detect potential insulation problems earlier than partial discharge measurement.

Additionally, PD results can be tailored to identify the specific type and location of faults. When making decisions for asset management, such as whether to replace, repair, or extend the life of a particular asset, PD monitoring results are an important factor in the decision-making process.

Permanent PD monitoring allows for live condition monitoring and predictive maintenance. When you constantly measure PD, you are made aware of insulation concerns immediately instead of needing to wait months or years between maintenance schedules, and you don’t need to risk interrupting operations to gain a view of insulation condition.

When a fault triggers the alarms, you can plan an outage safely so that PD can be measured off-line enabling you to perform further investigations that are only possible with off-line PD testing. This means PD monitoring can enable you to avoid asset failures.

Our monitoring solutions, such as the ICMmonitor and GISmonitor, provide a continuous view of your insulation’s condition. Modern features give you remote access and can notify you when issues arise no matter where you are. Integration with digital systems, for example, via IEC61850 protocol, give you ultimate visibility via the Smart Grid and give you remote access for service and support.

We also offer hybrid solutions, which cover both portability and on-line monitoring. The portability and ruggedness of the instruments allow for on-line measurements to be recorded over a period of time ranging from days to months, before moving to another electrical asset for another period. This allows users to prioritise their needs and decide which asset is most critical for PD measurement at a given time.

As technology continues to evolve, we must keep our eyes open for opportunities to improve grid visibility. As such, we know that partial discharge is not the only important parameter to be monitored to improve grid visibility, and this why it is our mission to provide on-line monitoring for multiple additional sources.

Our next chapter: Grid Analytics Solutions

Due to recent trends, the Smart Grid requires constant monitoring and analysis of valuable information required for operations and maintenance. Distributed Energy Resources (DER) require maximum grid flexibility, as operational and loading requirements change constantly depending on many external factors, such as wind and sunlight. Climate change and associated extreme weather events, as well as an aging grid infrastructure, add to these growing concerns, while the digitalisation of the Smart Grid contributes to solutions for improved reliability.

The role of Distribution System Operators (DSO) is becoming more critical as power-flows are becoming more complex and energy is constantly imported and exported by prosumers.

To tackle the challenges that arise from the modern power system, Megger offers Grid Analytics Solutions, which is composed of Smart IoT sensors - the MS5000 - that constantly monitor the electrical grid to find faults quicker and reduce the number of outages. After easy installation, the sensors start to immediately communicate with each other and share information. Electrical faults are detected in real time, immediately notifying operations and maintenance crews when a fault has been located, thereby decreasing the time needed for fault location, identification, and service restoration (FLISR). This enables you to decrease your System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI), an important metric for measuring grid performance, thereby ensuring the best uninterrupted service to your customers in the face of the energy transition.

Not only does Megger’s Grid Analytics Solutions offer help to minimise the duration of faults, but they also help you prevent faults, improving your System Average Interruption Frequency Index (SAIFI). GPS achieves this by identifying weak spots in the grid based on anomalies so that predictive maintenance can occur, preventing permanent faults in advance. Thanks to modern innovations in sensor and communication technology, grid sensors can serve multiple roles in addition to fault location. These features can assist with power quality analysis, informed data-based decision making, and can even reduce the risk of wildfires.

From the arctic circle in Northern Europe to the rural areas of South America, our customers around the world face similar challenges and share the need for improved grid visibility to unlock their grid performance. We have proven, together with our customers, that locating faults in difficult to access regions, in extreme weather conditions, and on-line and in real-time, can be made easier and more efficient. This requires flexible communication options, including direct cellular communication, mesh-radio, and/or integration with SCADA/DMS, and cybersecurity provisions to protect your data with the highest security standards.

Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) and Asset Performance Management (APM)

Planning for the future is a core part of Megger’s strategy and is essential for us to reach our goal “to provide electrical utilities with innovative solutions to meet the challenges of enabling and improving electrical grid performance”. Our recent strategic partnership with IPS Intelligent Process Solutions, a company based in Munich, Germany, brings together a strong combination of intellectual capabilities, opening doors to new solutions that enable increased efficiency and effectiveness for electrical utilities in maintaining the grid network, reducing costs, and minimising downtime.

IPS and Megger Group announced their strategic partnership in September 2021. IPS Energy is a leading provider of enterprise asset management, asset performance management, and workforce management for the global energy supply industry. As partners, we're working together to improve the operational efficiency of power and combined utilities by leveraging our collective intelligence to help the power industry reliably measure its own performance and act to minimise unplanned downtime and system outages. By combining our knowledge, the IPS Intelligent Data Lake was born; a unique solution enabling each party to contribute their expertise towards creating a final product.

Combining IPS’s sophisticated software solutions, AI expertise, and easy integration with Megger’s test and measurement expertise produces a greater and more powerful predictive dimension to electrical utilities’ testing methods, enabling true condition-based maintenance practices. This allows us to translate our insightful measurement results, such as partial discharge measurements (off-line or on-line), tan delta (power factor), dissolved gas analysis (DGA), grid analytics, and much more, to an asset health index and risk profile.

IPS Energy is our answer to the question “What do I do with the data?”. Together, Megger and IPS provide an unrivalled and compelling solution for public and private sector utilities.

As the energy industry is rapidly changing and facing many simultaneous challenges, condition-monitoring and predictive maintenance have increasing urgency. Optimal grid performance is achieved with the support of powerful measurement hardware and software tools. Off-line testing instruments, on-line monitoring solutions, and AI-driven software and analytics provide valuable insights and efficiencies to meet the challenges of the ever-evolving grid.

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