Power Up Your Plant with Custom Alerts and Event-Driven Asset Management

Bombarded with noisy alarms? Or you can not prioritize tasks when the beeping sound of yet another possible false alarm or inaccurate warning? Does your monitoring system only throw device alarms without looking at overall operating conditions?

The renewable energy industry is a competitive business landscape. Traditional approaches cannot keep up with the trends in Industry 4.0. According to McKinsey, sectors that have successfully implemented data and analytics, AI, and ML solutions saw 30-50% reductions in machine downtime, 10-30% increases in throughput, 15-30%  improvements in labor productivity, and 85% more accurate forecasting. In the renewable energy industry, leading players already use advanced asset performance management (APM)solutions to deal with unplanned downtime and, as a result,  reduce operating costs.

Efficient asset management is the key to achieving operational excellence. The efficiency of renewable assets is governed by the speed and accuracy of detection of the issues that impact the availability, reliability, and productivity. Hence, corrective action can be planned well with the right technical expertise. Today, the industry suffers from the flexibility available to asset managers to configure their strategy of monitoring to avoid nuisance alarms. 

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Many systems push the device’s condition, such as available, down, or under capacity without looking at the overall governance and issues at the plant level. This leads to significant overhead for the asset manager to swift through these alarms barrage to identify the most accurate alarms and events to work on. Hence, this is where innovative solutions such as custom alerts and event-driven asset management come into play.

Prevent losing your peace of mind while protecting your assets using Prescinto. Prescinto’s platform can manage and use time series data across the enterprise and promptly nip failures out of the bud. With Prescinto by your side, you can say goodbye to nuisance alerts and inaccurate warning messages by tailoring the alert systems based on your requirements.

Custom Alerts: The Smart Way to Stay Informed

Does your traditional asset monitoring platform provide correct and accurate alarms for wind turbine curtailment issues, unsatisfactory internal derating time, or solar cell inverter overheating? If not, chances are you are missing out on a lot! Typically, a conventional monitoring platform provides two types of notifications: –

1. Alarms: These are the issues resulting in system downtimes.
2. Warnings: These are the notifications for system malfunctions that do not result in an energy production loss- but need to be addressed.

In addition to alarms and warnings, the major drawback of these platforms is that it does not consider site-specific factors. Consequently, there is no accurate prioritization of corrective operations. Custom alerts take a more intelligent and context-aware approach. It leverages a rule-based engine to provide meaningful notifications tailored to your unique operational needs.

Custom alert systems can detect abnormalities and provide timely alerts before small concerns turn into costly breakdowns. This is done by monitoring real-time data streams from a wide range of connected devices, including energy meters, wind turbines, battery storage devices, and a myriad of sensor types. This proactive strategy, if integrated properly with plants’ current IT infrastructure, enables O&M teams and asset managers to remain ahead of the curve and fix issues before they severely influence operations. This degree of access and knowledge is critical for organizations that want to improve asset performance. As a result, creating a complete holistic image of asset health.

The Power of Prescinto’s Customized Alerts

One of the most significant advantages of custom alerts is their flexibility. 

• Thresholds are defined to set trigger points based on key performance indicators (KPIs) like vibration, temperature, pressure, energy loss, or any other relevant metric.
• Real-time notifications through instant consolidated alerts via email at scheduled intervals.
• Helps categorize alerts based on severity, ensuring immediate attention is given to high-priority issues.
• Can customize for different assets to create unique alert profiles for diverse equipment types, accounting for their individual characteristics and operating conditions- the Prescinto Factor.
• Manage false alarms using conditional notification filtering when IoT sensors and weather sensor malfunctions can trigger unintended alerts and if there are misconfigured thresholds.
• User-friendly interface leverages the rule-based custom alert engine functionality to identify underperformance with the snap of a finger. 
• Sets a platform for offline monitoring of assets and auto work order creation for solar, wind, and energy storage assets.

Event-Driven Asset Management: Automating Workflows

Does your existing monitoring system standardize heterogeneous data? Custom alerts are just the beginning. The volume of data and various classes of vendors who provide different offerings and operational processes lead to problems in scaling. There is a battle between noisy datasets and operator’s expectations about data availability.

Innovative asset management strategies include a proactive approach. This ensures organizations can respond swiftly to potential issues, minimizing downtime and maximizing asset availability. Event-driven asset management can automate various actions, such as dispatching maintenance crews and ordering replacement parts. By automating these procedures, organizations may drastically shorten reaction times and mitigate the effect of asset failures on their operations.

How does Prescinto’s Event-Driven Asset Management system work?

Prescinto is designed specifically to make an operator’s life easy. Data from SCADA, IoT-based inverters, data loggers, and much more are collected for this process. After this step data is selected, organized, and homogenized, and raw event generation is done. Events are categorized into groups based on a set of standardization rules. These categorized events translate into asset statuses and are visualized in a customizable dashboard. Hence, leading to the identification of events impacting the cost of production. 

Customizable dashboards and intuitive analytics tools empower operators and asset managers with a clear view of overall asset health. Moreover, it aids in making data-driven decisions to optimize maintenance strategies, resource allocation, and capital investments. By leveraging predictive analytics, organizations can not only predict potential issues but also receive guidance on the best course of action to mitigate risks and maximize asset performance.

Benefits of Event-Driven Asset Management for O&M

Prescinto’s event-based management brings more context to the events created. Thus providing an open ground to bring innovation in O&M strategies.

1. Derive operational insights and understanding impacts through tagging of high-level parameters like rate of lost energy and lost revenue. 
2. Prioritizing crucial events by managing and clearing out noisy data, error codes, and status codes.
3. Schedule maintenance at optimal times to avoid unnecessary preventive maintenance while ensuring timely interventions when needed.
4. Optimize resource allocation by prioritizing maintenance tasks based on criticality and potential impact, ensuring efficient resource utilization.
5. Reduce process time and increase ease of management aligned with set KPIs.
6. Improve overall equipment effectiveness: Minimize downtime, optimize performance, and maximize the value derived from your assets.

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Final Thoughts

As renewable asset management expands its scope and adapts to the changing competitive landscape, asset management requirements will undoubtedly shift. That is why it is critical to choose solutions intended for scalability. Prescinto is adaptable to changing organizational demands, allowing for smooth extension of capabilities as operations evolve. Whether managing assets limited to a specific geography -or a worldwide network of assets, Prescinto’s AI-powered APM solution provides a forward-thinking approach to asset management.

With energy availability and reliability becoming more and more critical, custom alerts and event-driven asset management represent a game-changing approach to asset optimization. Adopting a one-stop solution offering mission-critical features provides a compelling competitive advantage for renewable energy asset managers and O&M service providers looking to simplify processes, increase workforce efficiency, and generate long-term growth.