SCADA Systems - Support for the Maintenance Management of Hydro Power Plants

The energy market requires the global generating process control in order to reduce to the minimum the production costs. An important part of the generation company costs is represented by maintenance costs. Using the real time capabilities offered by the SCADA systems implemented in the hydro power plants it is possible to improve the maintenance strategy, integrate and synchronize the information from disparate systems in a global interface to support the operators in different conditions. The systems assist the operator for the dispatching and power scheduling, keep the generating units within the required operational limits, create power plant equipment´s status database and the technological parameters database. All these data are used for diagnosis and analysis of the equipment availability correlated with the required reliability as a specific parameter for maintenance