Root cause analysis of switchgear failure

Abstract

This research developed the Root Cause Analysis (RCA) guidance for switchgear equipment in 115 kV substation which is the highly importance in the system. The RCA are used for finding the real root causes of equipment failure that can help to solve the causes correctly and can set up preventive and corrective maintenance plans more efficiently. This method can reduce the occurrences of failure events and customer outage cost. The 115 kV substations in Central 1 (Ayutthaya) area of Provincial Electricity Authority (PEA) are used in the case study. The collection data for analyzing are from the annually maintenance report, the historical outage events and the interviewed information. The results shown that the proposed RCA for investigating root causes of PEA switchgear failure is the effective and applicable method which can be used for analyzing the other substation equipment.