Maintenance and Renewal Cost Evaluation for Managing Assets of Electric Power Equipment and Operational Data Analysis for Failure Rate Estimation

Abstract

In recent years, “asset management” or “managing assets” technique has been expected to rationalize maintenance and operation of electric power equipment, especially for aging equipment. Some concrete support tools have been developed by considering life cycle cost for substation equipment in “Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry, Japan,” which include failure risk evaluation. Such cost and risk evaluation are essential for comparative evaluation of different types of equipment. Failure probability is one of the most important factors for the evaluation. Because of its high reliability, electric power equipment can be expected to have a very long lifetime, therefore, durability test is not applicable, but rather relies on analysis of actual operational data. Collection, accumulation, and analysis of actual operational data are necessary for accurate evaluation. This chapter describes the evaluation method for the managing assets, and data collection and analysis to improve the accuracy of failure probability estimation.