Siemens: Maintaining grid stability with NXpower Monitor

This case study examines a specific IoT solution provided by Siemens for electrification and automation. Siemens AG is a focused technology company that combines the real and the digital worlds and helps customers to meet the great challenges of our time.

Maintenance is a key factor in ensuring maximum uptime of renewable energy operators. Unnecessary preventive maintenance is expensive, especially in remote locations. On the other hand, reactive maintenance can be even more costly when it is left too late. What the industry needs are monitoring systems to enable predictive maintenance and rapid response, especially for aging assets and components in remote substations where redundancy is not an option.

Our recent customer, a renewable energy operator, contacted us following a recent fire at a substation in Germany. It was later discovered that the cause was a cable connector that had failed due to age and humidity. The medium-voltage (MV) switchgear was severely damaged, and the operator had to shut down the four wind farms served by the substation until he could replace the equipment. The cost of lost production was approximately 5 million euros.  

This reference highlights the need for improved monitoring of remote sites. Remote temperature monitoring could have detected the problem in time to avoid the fire, but the substation’s telemetry system was not equipped for this. The basis of the digital substation consists of sensors to monitor environmental and equipment conditions. Sensors provide benefits in three areas: asset transparency, condition monitoring, and energy monitoring.

In this project, Siemens was able to replace the damaged MV switchgear with the IoT-enabled medium-voltage NXPLUS C switchgear and install the NXpower Monitor IoT application within just 16 weeks. The solution was complemented by managed services including on-call duty.

NXpower Monitor is a digital caretaker of the entire energy distribution, automation systems and networks at medium- and low-voltage levels. It allows visualization and continuous monitoring of electrical assets at a single substation or multiple locations from anywhere in the world, provides operational data, health status information and visualizes all alarms along with their status and details. 

This comprehensive solution helps to ensure 24/7 availability, facilitate maintenance, maintain grid stability and avoid unplanned downtime. Using the NXpower Monitor application, the customer can continuously monitor the health status of the system. If anomalies are detected in the measurement data, the customer can contact Siemens specialists directly via the on-call hotline. With this Siemens Xcelerator application, unplanned shutdowns can be converted into planned service calls in the future and the availability of the substation is maximized. 

Moreover, NXpower Monitor is a Siemens Xcelerator X offering that is by design scalable for future growth and expansion. The customer can connect not only more assets in the same location, but also in different locations over time. 

The use of advanced technologies can assist renewable energy operators in their operations and inspections. NXpower Monitor: 

• maximizes substation availability by reducing unplanned shutdowns; 
• enables predictive maintenance which results in fewer site visits and improved maintenance processes; 
• increases grid transparency through continuous visualization and monitoring of the health status of the system; 
• improves grid stability and asset utilization efficiency; 
• provides OPEX savings.

For more information, visit our reference pages - Siemens Xcelerator: Digital Substation Jabel, Siemens Xcelerator: Granzow digital substation, Gumtow – Germany 

More information about NXpower Monitor, its features and benefits can be found at siemens.com/nxpowermonitor.