New dissolved gas analysis technology can keep Hong Kong powering ahead

Imagine for a moment being the personal physician to a top athlete - a sportsperson who competes internationally at the highest levels and who is expected to be in superb physical condition at all times.

Monitoring that athlete's health and ensuring that he or she is in shape is a big responsibility and one that involves preventative checks and medical examinations to watch for the tiniest symptom of a problem that might impair their performance.

The daunting challenge of being that physician and looking after that athlete is similar in some ways to the challenge of maintaining the world-class power supply that Hong Kong depends upon.

In a 24-hour city with a thriving economy - and where most people live in high-rise buildings - we simply cannot afford to let our power supply sicken or fail, even for a few minutes. If it did, the consequences would be potentially catastrophic.

Today, happily, Hong Kong has supply reliability of 99.999 per cent, equivalent to just 2.6 minutes of unplanned power interruption a year and one of the highest rates anywhere in the world.

But the quest for ever-higher reliability is, by necessity, relentless - and now a new, state-of-the-art technology being piloted in Hong Kong could bring our reliability rating to even higher levels.

The secret lies in the technological equivalent of preventative medicine. Dissolved gas analysis (DGA) is just like the personal physician using the best diagnostic equipment available to carry out medical checks on the top athlete. Rather than blood tests, however, DGA checks transformers in substations and analyses the conditions of insulating oil used for cooling and insulation. When a potential electrical fault develops, gases are generated inside the transformer and can be detected in the insulating oil.