Hitachi Energy provides advanced service solution at world’s largest industrial park

Ibn Sina produces methanol, thermoplastics and other chemical-based products in Saudi Arabia. It is an affiliate of Sabic, the world’s fifth largest chemical company by sales. Ibn Sina’s huge production facilities – along with those of four other Sabic affiliates at the world’s largest industrial park, Jubail Industrial City - are powered by a 230 kV gas-insulated substation, designed and delivered by Hitachi Energy in 2016. 

The substation has performed flawlessly since commissioning and Ibn Sina wanted to secure the same exceptional levels of availability, reliability, and safety over the coming years.

“Ibn Sina had required several specific features to be part of the solution,” says Ahmed Diab, Service Business Development Manager in Saudi Arabia of Hitachi Energy's Grid Integration business. 

RelCare is Hitachi Energy’s digitalized lifecycle management service for electrical installations. It is the perfect combination of an advanced maintenance and asset management digital platform, with installation risk analysis, and unrivalled substation expertise. Together, these building blocks provide a comprehensive and customizable range of maintenance and asset management services that cover operation and maintenance requirements. 

The features included the ability to: 

• manage all maintenance tasks to ensure they are carried out successfully and as scheduled
• monitor key technical parameters  such as SF6 gas humidity to identify the first signs of declining asset performance and prevent an unexpected fault 
• create customizable and intuitive dashboards for critical substation components – transformers, circuit breakers, busbars, etc. – to allow performance trends to be monitored
• analyze faults through root-cause analysis to detect gaps in maintenance procedures
• enable a preventive reliability centered maintenance strategy instead of time-based maintenance; and allow asset life cycle management to determine the optimal and cost-effective time to repair, upgrade or replace a component. 

Hitachi Energy worked closely with Ibn Sina to tailor the RelCare partnership agreement to meet its requirements that will now help to secure reliable energy for its partners in Saudi Arabia. RelCare is embedding Hitachi Energy´s unique expertise which draws on more than 100 years of substation innovation and the world’s largest installed base of more than 10,000 substations delivered worldwide. 

As a result, Ibn Sina can now plan, optimize and budget for maintenance activities based on the most cost-effective time to maintain, upgrade, replace or retrofit an asset. Drawing on our substation expertise at all times they can interpret data and trends, minimizing the risk of an unexpected failure that could cause an outage or shut down of their chemical production. 

Furthermore, quantifying the contribution of each asset to the overall health of their system allows for the definition of a sustainable service strategy through the perfect combination of reliability, safety and cost.