The asset health review for managing reliability risks associated with ongoing use of ageing system power transformers

One of the most important roles for a utility operating in a de-regulated environment is to focus on effective risk management. Part of this is associated with the ongoing use of aged assets, and specifically managing the business consequences on system availability and energy not supplied that arise from unavailability of such equipment. The key role for the asset manager is, therefore, to be able to define equipment risks for future operation which will then permit criticality based decisions for managing operating and capital expenditure. Some of the processes used in UK to achieve this task are described in this paper, with a particular focus on network transformers.