Grid Talk: Moving Towards Condition-based Asset Management

Utilities struggle with their maintenance programs. They're almost always time-based. So, assets are maintained till failure and replaced at O&M expense, or they're inspected on some time interval. What they want to do is move to true condition-based maintenance programs.

A condition-based maintenance program requires knowledge of the true asset condition through monitoring, but it gives them the ability to capitalize that maintenance expense. Now, if they can capitalize the maintenance expense, then they can more effectively use that capital. But then the further benefit is they can move towards data-based predictive modeling. When might the asset fail, which is really where they want to go.