Neoenergia's Smart Grid Management Center (Cegri) will be undergoing a series of updates. The center, located in Salvador, at the head office of Coelba - distribution company serving the entire State of Bahia, centralizes the management of telecom operations and smart grids of the group's distribution companies. Now, the site will also concentrate the management and monitoring of digital assets. It means that all digital equipment used in the energy grid operations, such as smart reconnectors, meters, sensors and transformers, will be managed by Cegri.
The initiative contributes to the asset performance control and is integrated to the Innovation Center of Iberdola - Neoenergia's parent company - located in Qatar, which is equipped with supercomputers that analyze the equipment data and contribute to the predictive maintenance, anticipating possible failures and incidents. The updating of Neoenergia's Cegri integrates an Iberdola's global project so that all of the company's centers around the world - Spain, United Kingdom and United States - will also monitor the digital assets. In Brazil, more than 75 thousand devices are monitored by Cegri, a number that continuously increases, since Neoenergia makes constant investments in electrical grid digitalization.
“The devices are present in the entire energy grid infrastructure, such as poles, substations and customers' meters. With such integration of digital equipment, along with the telecommunications operations and smart grid assets, it is possible to monitor everything in real time, identifying problems beforehand", explained Marcel Tolentino, Neoenergia's operating technology and person in charge of Cegri.
The predictive maintenance is possible due to the use of data analytics in combination with artificial intelligence. Hence, an algorithm is created, capable of predicting when any failure will take place from track records of data collected by the equipment, which reaches 10 gigabytes a day. The challenge concerns the transformation of such amount of data into information that allows the assistance for a better decision-making process, and that is what supercomputers do. Located in Iberdola's Innovation Center in Qatar, such prediction algorithm is expected to, by the end of the 1st half of 2021, undergo a refinement process in order to provide even more assertive predictions, over 90%.
The result is the possibility of making quick decisions, which reinforces the reliability of the operations and increases the distribution company's capacity to operate, in order to decrease or prevent impacts of failures on the grid. Another benefit is in the fact that the service to incidents is located in a single location, which optimizes the efficiency of the field and expert teams of the Operations Center, who work together with Cegri.