Considerations on maintenance strategies for data communication assets in power distribution utilities

The last ten years have seen a steadily growing awareness across industries of the benefits of asset management. In the power industry, asset management has primarily focused on means to extend the lifetime of the transformers, cables, switchgear, and other critical components needed for the secure delivery of energy to the customers. However, with the new distribution automation concepts, with more distributed generation integrated within the power network and with a higher integration between the power system and the services of information systems, the importance of up-to-date and available information and communication services is growing. The maintenance of these service systems have nevertheless up to now not been structurally managed by the utilities. In this paper, the maintenance and management of the data communication systems of power utilities are considered. First, different aspects regarding the organizational issues are discussed. Then some key concepts of telecommunication management and information models for utility data are assessed. Results from case studies on the maintenance of the data communication resources in two power utilities with activities in both urban and rural areas, are presented. According to the findings in the case studies, the applicability of the different maintenance organizations, management support and maintenance methodology is assessed