Enel’s digital transformation and its commitment to improving the electricity service provided to its customers have been granted a prestigious acknowledgement at European Utility Week, recently held in Vienna. The global electricity company was given an award in the category “Best Digital Utility Transformation” of the Global Smart Energy Elites, a guide to the most cutting-edge smart energy projects drawn up by Metering&Smart Energy International and presented at the EUW.
“Enel’s commitment to improving grid reliability with the help of the C3 Energy predictive maintenance platform is an excellent example of a utility company that is successfully enacting a digital transformation strategy”, said Metering&Smart Energy International managing editor Claire Volkwyn, explaining the motivation of the award. “In the Global Smart Energy Elites 2015 guide we showed the wonderful work that Enel and other utility companies have performed to make the best use of smart grid transmitted data”.
Enel has developed, in a partnership with C3 Energy (US company that develops software for industrial applications), a predictive maintenance system used in 16,000 power substations in Italy, allowing Enel Distribuzione to accurately predict possible breakdowns in the medium-voltage distribution network. By integrating data from various sources (from the history of past failures to maintenance work history, from the ground and plant morphology to weather conditions), the system manages to update the ‘health status’ of the grid in real time. Thanks to the automatic updating model, a possible breakdown can be predicted and localised in a few seconds. This information allows Enel to carry out efficient inspections and solve possible problems proactively and with considerable savings.
Ed Abbo, C3 Energy president and CTO, said that “Enel is an innovator in the field of smart grids and a world leader in renewable energy. The company keeps on raising the bar in its digital transformation, which allows it to achieve objectives of greater reliability, operational efficiency and cost reduction”.
Livio Gallo, Head of Global Infrastructure and Networks Business Line, commented: ‘This award acknowledges the work we have already done to enhance the quality of our service with big data technologies. It is a welcome reward and further motivation for us to accelerate the process of digitizing our business’.
Enel’s reliability in providing electricity services is confirmed by the SAIDI (System Average Interruption Duration Index) value, the main parameter of quality in energy distribution, which puts the global electricity company at the top of the sector ranking with an average of only 40 minutes per year of interruptions.