Health index assessment for power transformer strategic asset management in electrical utilities

The health index (HI) has helped in driving electrical utilities' decision-making for strategic investment planning. This approach increases business ability to implement robust investment decision objectives that makes physical assets safe, efficient, and cost effective. Asset management (AM) ensures delivering the best quality of services by operating electrical network at the required performance cost while managing risks. This paper examines HI as an important section in AM. The HI is a building block in the AM process. It discusses transformer condition assessment using conventional method, data interpretation and international standards. Data management has improved, but a robust master dataset is either limited or not available due to a range of factors, including huge costs for capturing live data and data uncertainty challenges. A small number of electrical utilities are using recent data technology best practices for a large fleet of power transformers (PTs). Preliminary analysis for data management using Python Programming language (PPL) is considered.