The global spread of COVID-19 has left many individuals and communities filled with concern. The International Copper Association India(ICAI) stands with its members as they focus on the health, safety and well-being of their employees, their families and the communities in which they operate. Nothing is more important than human lives as we confront this crisis. We believe knowledge sharing is one form of co-operation and ‘Sharing is Caring’. Distribution Transformer (DT) is one of the vital high capex asset for DISCOMs. With some benchmarking data from few DISCOMs, it is observed that the technical losses in old legacy DTs have deviated significantly from the manufacturing specification values. It is estimated that the average overall technical losses in DTs with these DISCOMs could be as high as 3%, compared to 0.5% ideal value. This makes DT one of the key intervention areas for the DISCOMs to bring down their overall network Technical losses. There are some 12 Million DTs in India of different capacities (as per CEA statistics), and some 1 Million DTs fail every year. This high failure rate is result of weak asset management practices including low quality of repairs, and maintenance of DTs. These has resulted into degrading DTs performance in each repair cycle causing higher technical losses than GTP values. Unfortunately, most times only DT failure rate is the only performance metric tracked by the DISCOMs, but attention is needed to internal characteristics of the DTs, including the technical losses. Choice for DISCOMs is limited; either replace or repair and do best to avoid asset failure in such trying times for maintaining reliable supply, lifeline, to it’s consumers.

Continuous poor financial state of DISCOMs is cause of great concern for whole power sector. There are many reform programs initiated by the Government of India to modernize and improve the distribution network, utility processes and overall financial sustenance of DISCOMs, including Integrated Power Development Scheme (IPDS), DeenDayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana (DDUGJY), Ujwal DISCOM Assurance Yojana (UDAY) and others. These programs have yielded some positive results in distribution loss reduction but at lower speed and system improvement. Many DISCOMs have focused their overall loss reduction initiative around making individual DTs as profit centres, but again the focus goes only external to the DT. The webinar series “Efficiency and Reliability in Power Utilities” is a joint initiative of ICAI along with pManifold Business Solutions and Spark Group.

This webinar, first in the series, will bring Indian experts sharing their experiences from the field and answer the following questions:

• How has been their experience in the Distribution system and it’s critical role to deliver reliable, efficient and safe supply to consumers?
• What are the key reasons of high DT failure in India and where we are going wrong! How DISCOMs can meet their key KPIs by ‘doing more with less’
• What best practices can be adopted by Indian DISCOMs from specifying to upkeeping for getting best of their vital asset in the distribution system?
• What planning /decision matrix support is always needed to be in preparedness for quality supply delivery including such time for crisis?
• What are ways for DISCOMs to carry out Risk based asset management for DTs?
• What are new technology to address safety, prime concern at all cost, in highly populated areas or buildings for today and tomorrow.