Decarbonizing Maintenance: Using Predictive Analytics to Meet Hydropower’s ESG Mandate

Assessing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance is essential to understanding the impact and value of hydropower projects.

As climate change and resource limitations intensify, ESG remains a priority for the industry. The good news: Technological advances are helping hydropower leaders meet ESG standards and reduce environmental and operational risks.

The enterprise asset management (EAM) system of record, for instance, plays a key role in collecting data across assets. But, there’s an opportunity for hydropower plants to leverage the deep insights captured within this system to make decisions in real time to demonstrate responsible asset stewardship.

The Role of Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics have been important to the world of water for quite a long time. The earliest known use of predictive analytics can be traced back to 1689, when Lloyds of London used it to underwrite insurance for sea voyages.

While methods for predictive analytics have advanced significantly over the past 300+ years, the premise continues to be the same. By looking at historical data and identifying key trends, forecasts can be created to indicate what may happen in the future.

Using data from the EAM, relevant data over a significant period of time and across a wide range of assets and resources can be pulled together for analysis. Advanced data analytic tools can then consume this information and build models to identify where issues may arise — as well as optimize future maintenance activities.

For hydropower plants, this provides essential insight into what’s happening and why. In turn, it can help mitigate issues before they arise. This ensures that any failure or problem doesn’t impact broader sustainability goals for the organization or specific location.

Predicting and Preparing for Future Failures

In a hydropower plant, a failed component can lead to challenges with the ecosystem surrounding the hydropower facility while impacting things downstream, like habitat loss for animals and pollution.

Predictive analytics can provide benefits by helping identify failures before they happen, reducing the operational and environmental risk that they create. Data from the EAM combined with an asset intelligence platform can use existing asset information and historical data to generate advanced insights into what is expected to happen.

Endevor’s solution includes an advanced data analytics layer. This layer features artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to consume the data from the EAM and generate actionable insights based on key information with state-of-the-art machine learning models. In doing so, predictive analytics give light into how to prioritize maintenance to reduce downtime and optimize operations.

Advancing Maintenance Strategies with PM Optimization

Beyond predicting when components will fail, the same data can generate optimal maintenance strategies. Endevor’s platform integrates with EAM systems to pull asset management data and build an informed maintenance strategy that optimizes preventive maintenance.

For hydropower plants, this offers a number of benefits:

• Schedule maintenance during optimal water flows to reduce risk
• Reduce consumption of spare parts by focusing on as-needed maintenance
• Minimize impact with a proactive approach to managing the ecosystem
• Maximize resources with schedules built on field availability
• Demonstrate responsible asset stewardship to support ESG goals

The Future: Predictive ESG for Hydropower

With hydropower continuing to grow as a renewable energy source, finding ways to minimize environmental and social risk is paramount. Using advanced technology solutions to power predictive analytics will support the dynamic needs of hydropower plants.

From identifying failures before they happen to optimizing maintenance schedules, the industry already sees significant headway in adopting technology to advance predictive analytics.

In fact, these advancements could support a future where there’s predictive ESG for hydropower, helping to minimize overall risk to the local ecosystem and operations.

See how Endevor’s asset intelligence platform can turn your data into predictive analytics to support sustainability initiatives and goals.