ABB: Digital Remote Monitoring and Interactive Maintenance

Around 20% of unexpected failures are caused by environmental factors according to ABB — and a further 30% by a lack of maintenance. 

Nearly 90% of companies also acknowledge a skills gap in their team.

Lee Todd, Head of Sustainability Advisory Services at ABB Electrification Service, heads up ABB Navigate. 

Navigate looks to apply decades of ABB experience in a holistic way to tackle modern energy challenges including reliability, safety and security and energy and carbon. 

Lee shares his expertise with Energy Digital. 

Q. How does ABB Electrification Service contribute positively to the energy and climate tech spaces?

It’s an incredibly tough time for the industry right now.

Manufacturing, engineering, infrastructure and tech-focused businesses are progressively electrifying more and more of their operations in order to pivot away from fossil fuels and accelerate towards net zero. 

Global economic instability also isn’t helping.

Volatile energy and operating costs, logistics challenges and an engineering skills shortage adds additional complexities. This can make the journey towards full electrification a daunting one. 

Amid this volatility, companies are also undergoing a significant shift from capital expenditure (CapEx) to operational expenditure (OpEx) as they seek to squeeze maximum value from their existing assets and investments.

Rather than sinking capital into new equipment and facilities, businesses are increasingly turning to smart servicing, modernisation programmes and digital transformation initiatives in an effort to optimise processes in a flexible way and minimise operating costs for maximum benefit to the bottom line.

ABB Electrification Service is our customers’ north star on the road to net zero. We work across all industries to help customers manage, modernise and optimise their energy and electrical infrastructure to ensure maximum uptime, productivity and efficiency, while accelerating their journey to net zero carbon emissions. 

We understand the challenges and opportunities that organisations face in terms of reducing their carbon emissions and waste, while also grappling with the challenges of aging assets and shrinking investment.

Our team of close to 4,000 electrification service experts across more than 50 countries helps customers to drive sustainable business growth and profitability, ensure operational resilience and chart a pathway towards a net zero future.

Q. How can interactive maintenance and digital remote monitoring technologies help support decarbonisation efforts?

Allow me first to clarify what we mean by interactive maintenance.

Using sensors to monitor equipment condition and shift from reactive to proactive maintenance is nothing new.

However, while electrification equipment is rapidly becoming smarter and more connected, the majority of process and diagnostic data generated by these devices is often underutilised.

Interactive maintenance is about taking this data and putting it to work to drive improvement.

Advances in digital technologies such as AI, AR and VR hold the key to unlocking a future beyond reactivity, where digital tools can keep you informed about what’s really happening in your plant and allow you to take action to improve and optimise. 

Real-time monitoring can help to avoid energy spikes, while energy density mapping can contribute towards easier and more comprehensive ESG reporting.

AR tools can assist with skills and training, while digital remote access can allow potential issues to be identified and remedied quickly without having to wait for engineers to travel to site in person. 

In many cases, automated control systems can solve issues and optimise operations without any need for hands-on human involvement.

Each of the technologies mentioned can help to optimise operations, but in combination they can potentially have a transformative effect on how we approach and manage the management and maintenance of electrical equipment. 

Data is the new gold, and the rapid proliferation of it has allowed companies to leverage with ease real-time insights and predictive analytics that are not only beneficial, but increasingly essential to operations.

Asset management systems today are harnessing the power of the Internet of Things (IoT) to collect and build extensive and ever-increasing data sets from a myriad of devices.

The next step is transforming the signals and readings generated by these devices into actionable insights via cloud-based analytics platforms. By taking into account data from multiple sources, this can also add context to decision-making, allowing organisations to understand how best to optimise efficiency, productivity and profitability.

For example, imagine an IoT and cloud-based solution for managing electrical assets. This solution could integrate a dashboard with a range of low- and medium-voltage products and systems to achieve efficient management.

This would include the indication of an asset’s health status, active alarms and all of the information coming from the devices.

Safety could be further enhanced with arc fault detectors, providing critical protection against electrical hazards while minimising the need for on-site human intervention, owing to the use of remote monitoring.

Trend analysis can uncover latent issues that could otherwise take a human several weeks to identify and automated control can ensure that any issues are fixed long before they risk compromising equipment or operations.

Overseeing the health and operational efficiency of electrical assets becomes a central control room activity, with less need for maintenance staff to attend site and perform regular manual inspections. 

We know that running a piece of equipment right up to the point of failure can cost up to ten times more than investing in regular maintenance.

Predictive, planned maintenance can also be a particularly valuable complement to plant owners’ modernisation strategies.

Upgrading outdated components and managing them correctly can in some cases extend their working life by as much as 30 years, helping businesses achieve significant carbon and cost savings.

Energy efficiency and reliability are intrinsically linked.

Systems that run more efficiently put less strain on their component parts, while reliable, optimised assets will run more efficiently and with less downtime.

As technology advances, electrical systems have grown increasingly complex.

The variable nature of renewable energy sources like solar and wind mean that integrating them into a plant’s power infrastructure requires a delicate balancing act to ensure that there is enough power to keep systems stable and productive.

An interactive approach vastly increases the effectiveness and efficiency of maintenance activities, while providing greater visibility over what’s really going on in your electrical systems.

Q. What improvements have you seen in successfully implemented predictive maintenance strategies?

One of the big game-changers with predictive maintenance is the granularity it provides. But this alone is not necessarily enough.

I can walk into a factory and see that a circuit breaker needs replacing in the next six months based on its lifetime and history. But if I dive into the data that the circuit breaker has been producing, and that of the systems around it, I can pinpoint exactly when it’s likely to fail and put in place an alarm to tell the customer long in advance when that breaker needs to come out. 

Going deeper still, I can use the data to analyse the systems around the breaker and determine what causes it to fail.

The real cause might be nothing to do with the breaker itself and might be hiding upstream. Solving that underlying issue once and for all can save huge amounts of money and practically eliminate the vast majority of breaker failures.

Asking the right questions is crucial, as is determining the outcomes you want.

Net zero is not just an end in and of itself. If a factory can reduce its energy consumption per unit produced, then this can dramatically improve operational profitability. But again, this comes back to reliability. 

We can drive down your energy usage from application to application, but if your electric motors are more than 20 years old then that’s where we need to focus our attention first.

Fixing that can then have a transformative effect on the efficiency of other processes across the plant. 

Q. How does real-time data contribute to improving safety and reliability in energy operations?

Remote monitoring literally takes human beings out of harm’s way.

Limiting the need for routine manual inspection visits means reducing the exposure of personnel to dangerous situations. And in the event that an engineer does need to attend site to deal with a potentially hazardous issue, they can be supported with remote guidance and advice from control room staff, aided by digital tools like mixed reality.

As a central element of wider interactive maintenance strategies, remote monitoring helps organisations ensure that their electrical assets are always operating efficiently and within safety limits. 

To give a tangible example, older circuit breakers can be replaced with smart new breakers that are connected to cloud-based IT platforms.

Monitoring this stream of data in real time can give plant owners a clearer picture of how their assets are performing. This can help to pinpoint potential safety issues before they develop into full-blown hazards and before they risk disrupting production.  

Remote monitoring is also becoming increasingly attractive at a time when there’s a widely reported shortage in engineering talent.

Engineers with decades of experience are retiring from industry and many organisations are struggling to fill this skills gap.

Remote monitoring is thus a desk-based activity that’s more in tune with the skills and expectations of a new generation of engineering talent.

It also allows organisations to stretch finite monitoring and maintenance resources more broadly.

Q. As we move towards a clean energy future, how do you see the role of interactive maintenance evolving?

Integration of renewable energy sources is an increasingly important aspect of every organisation’s net zero journey. Pivoting away from our historic reliance on fossil fuels is of course a major contributor to reducing carbon emissions. 

As industry progressively electrifies, however, this means a corresponding increase in the size and complexity of organisations’ electrical infrastructures.

In parallel with this, businesses are reinforcing their own energy security by investing in ‘home grown’ power generation capacity from on-site sources like wind and solar. 

This makes the picture more complicated still — further highlighting the importance of interactive maintenance and monitoring to ensure critical systems are operating as efficiently and safely as possible. 

What’s more, retrofitting near-obsolete components with digitally enabled upgrades can help organisations achieve improved grid resilience with performance improvements and greater levels of sustainable efficiency.

Explore the latest edition of Energy Digital Magazine and be part of the conversation at our global conference series, Sustainability LIVE.

Discover all our upcoming events and secure your tickets today.

Energy Digital is a BizClik brand