Nova Scotia Power Optimizes Maintenance Strategies with APM

Nova Scotia Power (NSP) is a vertically integrated utility serving 500,000 residential, commercial and industrial customers in the Nova Scotia province.

Like many utility companies, NSP faced a series of challenges that included aging generating assets, growing knowledge gap, changing generation profile and utilization, and need for increasing transparency by regulatory agencies. A key to meeting those challenges was the design and standardization of their asset management processes throughout their steam, hydro and combustion turbines fleet.

To overcome these challenges, the NSP Asset Management team partnered with GE to apply real time analytics to their Asset Performance Management (APM) program, following a progressive strategy consisting of focus on and improvements within their work management, reliability, advanced technology, information management, and asset planning processes. Nova Scotia Power uses APM Health and APM Strategy, part of the APM solution suite, to manage and extract value from their flood of asset-related information.

APM provides NSP with ongoing, near real-time visibility to their fleet assets’ health to enable informed decisions around strategies for improving the collective reliability of the fleet. NSP has begun to use the policy designer capabilities in APM to perform operational risk assessments of selected asset families to allow for better prioritization of their resources, capital, and labor on asset classes showing the greatest risk to the business. These benefits include the ability to optimize investment and resources translating to significant year over year value to the business.