Stuart Thompson, President of ABB Electrification Service explores the role of proactive maintenance in decarbonisation.
Decarbonising the world’s energy supply is one of the greatest challenges facing society. The world needs cost-effective access to more power to meet its needs.
To create a clean and sustainable energy future, however, we must pivot away from our reliance on fossil fuels in order to lower carbon dioxide emissions and slow the damaging effects of climate change.
Growing consumer demand for energy is accelerating the need for well maintained and efficient operations. Shifting from reactive to more proactive maintenance strategies is crucial to building and ensuring resilience.
The next step on this journey to greater efficiency and sustainability is an evolution from traditional reactive and proactive models to an evolved paradigm of interactive maintenance that often draws on the complementary skills and resources of an expert partner.
Characterised as ‘making data do the work for you’, interactive maintenance leverages advances in digital tools and infrastructure to achieve meaningful operational improvements, underpinned by a consultative approach with an expert partner to identify and actualise beneficial outcomes.
“Technology allows potential problems to be pinpointed and rectified long before unplanned stoppages occur,” explains Stuart Thompson, President of ABB Electrification Service.
“For example, remote monitoring can be complemented by advanced tools like Augmented Reality and digital twins. These allow issues to be investigated and resolved without the expense and delays of needing physical site access by skilled engineers.
“Embracing this approach can unlock unprecedented cost savings, while continuous optimisation, underpinned by real-time data, can drive meaningful improvements in meeting efficiency, safety and reliability targets.”
Stuart shares his thoughts with us.
Please introduce yourself
I am President of ABB’s Electrification Service division. This US$1.2bn revenue business with close to 4,000 global service professionals across 50 countries was established as a standalone business area in 2022.
Prior to this I’ve held roles as Global Product Group Service Leader for both ABB Electrification and ABB Electrification Distribution Solutions division.
With an installed base of over 17 million low-voltage and medium-voltage installations, Electrification Service delivers innovative technology and services to customers from across utility, industrial, manufacturing, infrastructure and building sectors.
Our portfolio secures the safety, reliability and efficiency of electrical infrastructure, delivering new levels of operational and sustainable efficiency to meet the energy challenges facing global businesses.
What do you mean by decarbonisation?
It’s critical for utilities and other industrial organisations to build effective resilience strategies in response to a volatile commercial and geopolitical environment.
Central to this is securing greater operational agility and flexibility, supported by new tools and technologies. In every industry sector there’s also a corresponding focus on greater circularity. This is reflected in efforts to reduce the consumption of energy from fossil fuel sources and making greater use of renewables. It also extends to maximising the working life of equipment and systems, and broadening the reuse and recycling of goods.
At ABB we’re working hand-in-hand with our customers to help them close the loop on circularity and decarbonize their operations. We’re doing this with our portfolio of energy-efficient electrification products, digital solutions and proactive, innovative services.
These range from upgrades and retrofits that extend the working life of equipment to predictive maintenance that can pre-empt costly failures, extending all the way to responsible end-of-life asset management. Just as importantly, our consultative approach to tackling customers’ sustainability challenges means offering guidance on the right technology strategies to assure the availability, reliability and sustainability of their critical assets, now and in the future.
Let me give you a couple of examples of how we’re guiding customers on their own decarbonization journey. We’ve helped Norway’s largest district heating and waste incineration company, Hafslund Celsio, complete a major modernization project to refurbish switchgear in its waste-to-energy plant on the outskirts of Oslo. Cost-efficient switchgear upgrades have allowed the customer benefit from our modern Emax2 air circuit breaker with Ekip Touch relay protection and energy metering.
Nordværk is one of Europe’s major waste-to-energy plants, providing renewable energy to thousands of households in northern Denmark. ABB Electrification Service successfully helped modernise Nordværk’s ageing circuit breakers with state-of-the-art circuit breakers with advanced monitoring and communications, helping to ensure safe and sustainable operations of the 42 MW district heating plant.
Supporting our customers in their efforts to achieve more sustainable operations has immediate benefits in terms of reduced costs and lower carbon emissions.
One way we can do this is through smart digital technologies that monitor the energy consumption and overall health of electrical assets. By helping our customers modernise their electrical infrastructure with smarter, more efficient components we can add years – or decades – to the working life of systems. This can dramatically reduce the cost and environmental impact associated with manufacturing, transporting and installing new systems to replace inefficient, unreliable hardware that’s close to obsolescence.
This focus on repairs, retrofits, reuse and recycling embodies what we call our ‘smart service’ philosophy. Upgrading outdated components, for example, can reduce the cost of operating equipment by a third and extend its life cycle by as much as 30 years, with enormous savings in energy and costly maintenance over that time.
Retrofitting dated components with digitally-enabled upgrades can also help achieve improved grid resilience with performance improvements, investment optimization and new levels of sustainable efficiency.
How can proactive maintenance support energy decarbonisation?
We’re seeing a big upswing in the popularity of proactive and preventative maintenance strategies, enabled by advances in technology like AI-assisted data analytics and cloud computing.
To give an example, we can replace a customer’s older circuit breakers with more intelligent, sensor-enabled breakers that are connected to cloud-based IT platforms.
Analysis of this data can give a fine-grained picture of asset condition, performance and potential safety issues, helping prevent potential hazards before they arise and minimising disruption to production.
What are the challenges presented by switching to proactive maintenance? What is interactive maintenance, and why do you think that is the future of low carbon energy maintenance?
More proactive and interactive approaches to delivering maintenance are becoming more desirable in an environment where traditional reactive strategies no longer fit operators’ needs. There can be a number of reasons for this sea change. There’s an increased focus on core business, with service arrangements being routinely outsourced to multipurpose companies.
Equipment is becoming smarter and more software-oriented, with embedded intelligence and IoT connectivity. And from a skills perspective, we’re seeing a generational change of operators. These are all trends that have contributed to reactive maintenance services being no longer fit for purpose with utilities and other industrial organisations.
Proactively advising our customers about lifecycle services is the first step in taking this journey. This is typified by the shift from basic time-based or corrective maintenance toward more advanced time-based and condition-based maintenance approaches.
The ultimate destination is genuine interactivity between service provider and customer operators. Predictive maintenance is the logical conclusion of this journey, where human expertise is progressively transferred to IoT enablers and AI based applications. Both service provider and customer operators are active players, working in partnership by leveraging a common high-end layer of soft-based solutions.
In this paradigm, maintenance is performed only where and when it’s needed, with regular in-person inspections supplemented and ultimately replaced by on-line monitoring. Troubleshooting on site is performed by customer operators – who’ve been trained on the job using tools like mixed reality – with remote support and guidance by the service provider.
As well as minimising loss of production and affording energy savings, this interactive approach to maintenance can support industrial organisations’ sustainability and decarbonization goals by reducing the need to transport personnel and materials for routine inspection and servicing visits.
I’ve already hinted that ‘interactive maintenance’ suggests a more consultative, dialogue-based approach to helping organisations achieve their efficiency and sustainability goals. And that’s something that’s reflected in ABB Navigate – our own suite of engineering and consultancy services that’s designed specifically to support customers on their own very individual net zero journey.
This is a process that typically begins with data collection and baselining to help customers understand what this journey looks like, and the eventual benefits it can deliver. Leveraging ABB’s unmatched electrification experience and know-how, our expert consultants can then help construct strong foundations of reliability, safety and energy efficiency on which all other operational technology sits.
It’s no surprise that this is a strongly data-driven exercise. The transparency and granularity of the information we’re able to collect about our customers’ infrastructures helps surface powerful insights that we can translate directly into effective optimization and maintenance strategies. We’ve got some incredible technology at ABB. But ultimately our electrification service is people driven.
It’s about working continuously with customers on their journey to a more energy efficient, sustainable and safer future. In other words, it’s about offering ourselves as a willing and able partner who’s always ready – day or night – to help keep the lights on.
