May 10, 2006—More than a dozen major electric utilities are now committing to new voluntary standards to help prevent a major source of blackouts by monitoring their expensive power transformers, Serveron Corporation announced.
Because high-reliability power generation and distribution are critical for utilities and their customers, electricity producers and distributors are among the organizations now taking this new, yet proven approach, says the company.
On-site transformer monitoring is helping them watch their transformers more closely, operate them with a greater margin of safety, and manage them to minimize the costs of repairing or replacing these valuable assets.
The voluntary implementation of this new standard practice requires installing advanced, remote monitoring systems on newly installed power transformers, as well as retrofitting existing units. Advanced transformer monitoring—essentially checking a transformer’s insulating oil on-site— has been shown to prevent what utilities call “unplanned failures,” through performing dissolved gas analysis (DGA) within these large, complex devices several times each day while they are running.
Serveron’s field-proven gas chromatography technology reliably correlates DGA data to external events and has facilitated the prevention of many transformer failures. More than 45 major utilities worldwide already use Serveron’s products and services, says the company. For more on Severon, visit the company Web site.
