Asset Management in Power Industry, Means to More Efficient Operation

As a result of industry restructuring and the desire to gain the competitive advantage, worldwide industry interest in asset management has increased over the last decade. Utilities needs for financial processes transparency, scheduled maintenance programs and system components aging were important factors accelerated trends to use asset management programs in industries all over the world. For the foreseeable future, utilities will need to manage on array of potentially business objectives, including the needs to maintain competitive economic performance, improve customers’ satisfaction, maintain high reliability, address regulatory uncertainty and comply with increase environmental regulations. The result is that many utilities are considered or have moved toward implementing forward asset management concepts & driving decision-making based on minimizing equipment life cycle costs.
Power Systems technical & economical issues such as operational costs, risk & system constraints are hardly analyzed together due to large scale of power systems, So a comprehensive study in system operation is sometimes missed, Asset Management is tool looking for development of such a rational compromise among system Risk, Cost & Operation to reach minimized system operation long-term costs.
Power system assets sometimes are considered only equipments energized in generating units, transmission grid and distribution networks and factors such as Time, Employees, Information and Technology are excluded from power system assets, but Asset management is a fundamental business activity that is going to involve the effective use of all these resources to achieve system desired goals.
To help address issues relevant to Asset Management, this report presents guidelines for Asset Management in power delivery which is organized as follows.